Empowerment
by Coriander Tea
Summary: Begins after Last Stand, time jumps back to First Class.  Erik's death causes a lot of trouble for the disabled girl who befriended him in his old age.  An OC for people who hate OCs.  Now with potential Wolvertique!
1. Imprisonment

Disclaimer: I own nothing and am not getting paid for this.

Teratogen: An agent which causes non-genetic birth defects in a developing fetus, as opposed to a mutagen, which affects the DNA. A teratogen can be chemical, such as a pesticide or a medication, an infection such as syphilis or rubella, or a nutritional deficiency. Derives from the Greek 'teras', meaning monster or marvel.

Teras is also the root word for terror, terrible, tyrant and terrific.

* * *

><p>They are holding me here illegally and in violation of my rights as an American citizen. While I doubt I will be released any time soon, and I doubt even more strongly that this notebook will ever get out of here with or without me, I've little else to do but stare at the walls. Anything to help pass the time.<p>

In this case, 'they' are Homeland Security, and I was effectively kidnapped. I wasn't read my rights, I wasn't allowed to make a phone call, and my requests for a lawyer have gone unanswered. I was tricked into going into the van 'to make my statement', given an injection against my will, passed out, and woke up here. I don't think this is Guantanamo. I wasn't out that long. At least, I don't think I was. Besides, this place is air conditioned and doesn't look like the photos of cells there. Probably it's somewhere in Virginia, like most of those government agencies. Although maybe it's somewhere out west. I found a dead scorpion under the bunk.

Why am I here? The charges against me are quite specific. Aiding and abetting the mutant terrorist Magneto. Well, I didn't know he was Magneto.

Nobody knew he was Magneto until the coroner got back to the morgue with the body and checked his fingerprints and DNA. Meanwhile, I was still pottering around his apartment trying to find an address book so I could contact his next of kin. Despite being there when the paramedic crew broke the door open to find him crumpled in a heap on the kitchen floor, his face blue-white on one side and purplish with lividity on the other, colder than the linoleum and even more dead, I was having trouble processing that my gentlemanly chess partner—more than that, my _friend_ was… dead. When he hadn't returned my calls for a couple of days, I went over to knock on his door. When he didn't answer, I called 911. He was such an old man, after all. He might have had a stroke, or fallen and broken a hip.

Who am I kidding? When I saw him last, around the end of February, he hadn't looked well at all. He said he was getting over a cold. Even then, I knew he lied.

Someone is at the door.

* * *

><p>They came to take me to see the body, including the horrible Y shaped autopsy cuts, crudely sutured together. It was terrible. Of course death is always terrible, but he had been so dignified in life. Seeing him there, half- naked, his muscles withered, his skin gone all saggy, age-spotted, was disgusting above and beyond the smell, the scars and the scabs. How is it possible he was ever a vigorous young man?<p>

He had been riddled with oat tumors, the medical examiner said. Small cell carcinomas, I replied. My bachelor's was in biochemistry.

It had metastasized throughout his body, so much so that the cancers outweighed his internal organs. Did you know, they asked me, that he had been experimenting in his apartment? Experimenting with mutagenic chemicals. Trying to get back his powers.

No, of course I didn't know that.

The problem was, mutagenic chemicals were also carcinogenic. They had to evacuate the building and declare it a biohazard site, there was so much ethylmethane sulfonate impregnating the air ducts. Had I been in his apartment often?

No. Never. In the building, yes, but he always met me at the door. I'd never gone inside.

Had I been sleeping with him?

No! He was at least fifty years older than I. Even if I'd found him attractive—seeing him lying there on the slab dead was bad enough—he didn't seem interested in sex anymore. We played chess in the park or in the library once a week and went for coffee or tea afterward. We talked. He was old and frail and lonely.

Had we ever talked about mutants?

Of course. Everybody talks about mutants now and then. Everybody has an opinion.

They seemed surprised that I was willing to admit it. What had he said about mutants?

He hadn't said very much, but let me do most of the talking.

And so the questions went on and on.

* * *

><p>I didn't know who he was when I met him. Who was Magneto, after all, but an angry voice issuing from a silly helmet, a caped figure dressed in colors no sane heterosexual man would ever wear? Yes, the trial after the Statue of Liberty incident was televised, his face laid bare to the world, but he looked like such an ordinary old man, his face creased and weathered, his hair silver grey like a dandelion gone to seed.<p>

When I saw him in the park that October day, he looked ordinary then too, only perhaps a bit seedier. Not at all like a mutant, or a sociopath, or a terrorist, let alone a sociopathic mutant terrorist. A tired old man in shabby clothes, sitting at a chess table, that was all he was. It was the only table with a place free, as it happened, and I came to the park that day hoping for a game. Yet I didn't approach him right away, because he might have been waiting for someone, a regular opponent. I don't make friends easily, and I didn't want to intrude and be rebuffed.

As I watched, a single scarlet oak leaf drifted down from the trees around us, landing on his white head, where it looked like nothing so much as splash of blood.

I'm lousy at reading omens, so that resemblance didn't put me off. He reached up, patted his head and found the leaf, which he then shredded into a dozen flakes, scattering them on the ground. Suddenly he turned his head and looked directly at me. "Is there something I can—I can do for you, young lady?" he asked, pausing in the middle when he realized what he was looking at.

Time for the First Inevitable Explanation.

I held my arms up so he could see the prosthetics clearly. "I'm not a mutant," I explained for the seventy thousandth time in my life. "It's a birth defect called bilateral limb deficiency phocomelia, which has no genetic cause. These are artificial limbs made of hard epoxy and steel." I opened and closed the hook pinchers. "They do not shoot fire and they're not razor edged. All they do is allow me to live independently without being a drain on the taxpayers or a burden to my family."

"I see," he replied. "I take it you've had to say as much before."

The ice broken, I stepped closer. "Yes. My parents were explaining it to people before I could talk. I was wondering if you were up for a game. If you're waiting for someone to join you, I'll understand."

"He can only join me in my memories, I'm afraid," the elderly man said, his voice colored with regret. "I'm quite willing to play, my dear—if you care to make it interesting, that is."

He meant money, of course. I had heard about 'chess hustlers' before, but never encountered one until now. "How interesting?"

"Oh, twenty dollars," he shrugged.

I could afford to lose twenty dollars (and if he was playing strangers for money in the park, he had to be so good that I would certainly lose) but that didn't mean I wanted to throw my money away. However, I looked at the shabby clothing, a little too light for this fall day, and at the weary slump of his shoulders. Was this how he was eking out a Social Security check and a retirement fund depleted by the economic downturn? Might my twenty be the difference between a real meal tonight or filling up with toast and tea?

I made up my mind. "Honor system or cash on the table?" I asked, taking a seat.

"I'm quite comfortable with the honor system," he said, settling himself back down. He'd half-risen, gentlemanly, when I sat. "My name is Magnus Magnussen, by the way."

"Joon-Yi Kaplan," I replied.

"Joon-Yi _Kaplan_?" he asked.

Time for the Second Inevitable Explanation. "I was born in South Korea and adopted by the Kaplans when I was a baby. They let me keep my birth name." I took the white pieces and began arranging them on my side of the board.

He watched me without asking any more questions, placing the black along his side. There were more anthropomorphic prostheses than mine on the market, ones which looked like hands and even some with electronic joints. I'd tried demos, and found them to be clumsy, awkward things, heavy in the wrong areas. The cable-and-hook variety I used were low-tech but were more comfortable and gave me the greatest range of function. I hardly counted as disabled at all with them on, really.

"Yes, I am quite dexterous, considering," I answered his unspoken question. "My move first, I believe."

It's not really possible to play chess and carry on a casual conversation, not if you're playing right. For the next hour and forty-five minutes we made our moves in turn, all in silence, until he backed me into a corner where he could just keep putting me in check over and over again, and I conceded.

"Thank you for the game," I said, pulling out my wallet and finding a couple of fives and a ten. "I would like to play again sometime, if you don't mind."

"On most fine days, you will find me here," he gestured to the corner we occupied, "and when the weather is inclement, I go to the library on Milton."

It was a Friday when we had our first game, and what with one thing and another, I didn't make it back to the park until Sunday over a week later. He beat me again, but again, I did not grudge him the money. He was gaunt, and the skin on the back of his hands nearly transparent over the ropy blue veins, liver spotted. I always notice people's hands and arms. I didn't know about the number he had tattooed on his forearm, though. Not then. It was mid October and he had on long sleeves. That would come later.

For a few weeks, our relationship, such as it was, continued as it began. We played one game of chess, keeping our personal interaction minimal. I felt some degree of compassion for him, and he seemed quite indifferent to me, beyond an old-world gentlemanly politeness. That changed on a Saturday in November when it rained, driving us into the library.

Halfway through the game, a mother with two children passed us on the way to the kids' section. The younger boy pointed at me and blurted out to his mother. "Look, it's the girl from the pharmacy! The one with the Go-Go-Gadget arms!" She shushed him, apologized, and dragged him off.

"Was that young man correct?" Magnussen asked with his first real hint of interest. "Do you work for a pharmacy?"

"Yes," I replied. "I'm a pharmacist. Doctorate, license and everything. I work for Carefirst."

"Ah, one of those HMOs. But—a doctorate? How old are you, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Twenty-six. My bachelor's degree is in biochemistry and then I went to pharmaceutical college for three years in the accelerated program."

"So you are actually _Doctor _Kaplan," he smiled.

"One of three PhDs in the family," I told him. "My dad is a dentist and my one older sister has a doctorate in early childhood education."

"Really?" he inquired. "How many siblings do you have, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Not at all," My family was the best thing in my life, and we all like to talk about things we love. "I have three, two sisters and one brother, all older. They're not adopted. After three kids and fifteen years of marriage, my folks went to this fundraiser for an orphanage in South Korea, and they watched this video of the children who needed the most help. I was one of them. Instead of just writing out a check, they decided to get a little more involved."

Someone at the next table gave me a dirty look, so I lowered my voice. "But maybe this isn't the best place to talk."

"Hmm," Magnussen frowned, then smiled. "Would you care to go for a cup of coffee after the game? My treat."

"All right," I said. Why not? He wasn't a stranger, not exactly, it would be a public place, and anyhow, he was at least fifty years older than I, perhaps more. What ulterior motive could he possibly have toward me?

Not what anyone might think.

"—so they said they fell in love with me at first sight. God alone knows why, because I had a hare lip, a cleft palate, you know, along with—not having lower arms. Plastic surgery fixed that so no one can even tell." I said later, while he had a café Americano and I had mango Darjeeling tea.

"But what about your genetic parents?" Magnussen asked. "What of them?"

"No idea," I dunked a biscotti into my tea and nibbled on it. "I know nothing about them and very probably never will."

"You sound remarkably nonchalant about them."

"Why shouldn't I be? Did you see the National Geographic special, China's Lost Girls?"

"No," he replied. "However, you were born in South Korea…"

"What's true of China is, or up until recently, was true of South Korea too. They have strict population control laws. One child per family, with heavy fines in some cases or forced abortions in others. The societal bias is in favor, strongly in favor, of male offspring. If they can only have one child, they want a boy. The girls get aborted, abandoned, adopted. Or in my case, a little of all three." I said the last part flippantly.

"Is that what happened to you, a botched abortion?" he asked.

"No, not really," I grimaced. "In my case, it was either exposure to a teratogenic chemical or lack of the right nutrients at the wrong time. They can't tell, and in the long run, it doesn't matter. Mind you, my nonchalance is recent. Ten years ago, I was a very angsty, very angry kid. I got over it eventually."

He smiled wryly. "I wish my old friend Charles' students could have met you. Theirs was a never-ending cycle of angst and self-torment. Your maturity is quite refreshing."

"Thank you," I said. "Of course, the anti-anxiety medication helps a lot too."

He laughed. I believe he thought I was kidding. I was not.

But that was how the friendship began. Only later did I find out he was using me.

TBC….

A/N: Okay, you're probably thinking, WTF? I hope you'll continue reading anyway.


	2. Withdrawal Pains

My head feels funny today, and I know exactly why. They confiscated my purse and everything in it, including my medication. I only retained this notebook and pen because I had them in my coat pocket. It takes about four days for the medication to clear the body completely. The withdrawal symptoms for paroxetine, as I know well, being a pharmacist by trade, include (but are not limited to) flu-like symptoms, difficulty thinking and/or concentrating, dizziness, vertigo, a recurring feeling like an electric 'zap' in the head, disorientation, panic attacks and hallucinations.

What _fun_ awaits me…

When they come by to interrogate me some more, I will try to impress on them just what a wreck I'll be, and soon.

At least they didn't take away my clothes.

Somebody must have noticed I'm missing by now.

If I start thinking about my family I'll start crying. I'll write about something else instead.

* * *

><p>"So you weren't joking about the anti-anxiety medication?" Magnussen asked, a week or two later.<p>

"No." I wrapped the string of my teabag around my spoon and squeezed the last drops of tea out of it. "Otherwise I would have great difficulty leaving the house, let along holding down a job. You know how a sensible person takes precautions like not going to certain areas of town after dark and not putting all the boxes from their new TVs and gaming consoles out on the curb right after Christmas?"

He creased his forehead in thought. "I suppose… Yes, where I live now, I would not care to venture to the convenience store after eleven. Not as I am now."

"Well, I'm small, female, young, Asian, and disabled— in a society which looks at any deformity as proof that somebody's a mutant. In high school, I was chosen as Most Likely To End Up In A Shallow Grave. It was a joke, but still—. Point being, to the wrong person, I'm like a fifty dollar bill lying around on the sidewalk—and wrong people can crop up anywhere. I mean, there was that case recently where a graduate student—young, small, Asian and female—was murdered right in her school's science building after hours by the lab assistant, in a place where she should have been safe. Maybe she reprimanded him for something and he just couldn't take being bossed around by her. Maybe he always wanted to get with an Asian chick but she wasn't up for it. Either way, she wound up dead. And she was smart about going places after dark, and taking precautions.

"I'm aware of how vulnerable I am. One good yank, and I'm literally disarmed." I laughed, not happily. "If you only knew how often I wished I really were a mutant, because then I'd have the power to protect myself, maybe even band together with other mutants for mutual protection."

"You actually want to be a mutant?" he asked, almost comically surprised.

"Hey, I have all the disadvantages of being one, so it would be only fair if I had some compensation. I'd take being able to fly or something. Anyhow, since the alternative is letting my anxiety cripple me worse than the birth defect, I take a pill twice a day."

"Have you suffered a great deal by being taken for a mutant?" How easy it is, now to understand the haunted look on his face, the urgency in his voice.

"It's kind of relative. I mean, there was this cancer patient we had last year who had half his face removed because of mouth cancer. He looked weirder than hell, but he was doing great, in remission, planning reconstructive surgery—and then an anti-mutant mob got hold of him one night, chained him to a fence, doused him with gasoline, and set fire to him. He couldn't even say 'Stop, I'm not a mutant!' because his tongue had been taken out, plus most of his lower jaw. I don't think it would have made any difference, anyway. He lived through it, but then the cancer came back while he was getting skin grafts, and…he just didn't have the fight in him anymore. He died three months later. Compared to that, I haven't suffered at all."

"I remember the incident. It was made much of by the media. One wonders what the reaction would have been if he had been a mutant. 'He got what he deserved.', perhaps." There was a world of bitterness in his voice.

"_I _wouldn't say it was all right," I said, in protest. "The problem is that before anybody even knew exactly what a mutant was, they knew they were dangerous."

"On what do you base that conclusion?" he asked.

"A paper I wrote for an ethics class. Before the Cuban missile crisis, references to mutants in the media were rare, the stuff of science fiction. There's one movie of the era where they pronounce it 'Mute- Ant' throughout, that's how ignorant the era was."

He nodded. "This Island Earth, starring Rex Reason, Faith Domergue, and Russell Johnson, 1955. I saw it in the theatre. A very silly piece of entertainment. So—what, in your opinion, changed humanity from their blissful state of ignorance concerning mutants to enmity towards them?"

At that point the barista came over and said, nastily and rather threateningly, "If you're going to keep talking like this, you're going to have to leave." Now it was sleeting out, and we were almost the only customers there. Since the closest one was actually snoring in his chair, the only person we could have been upsetting was the barista himself.

Magnussen stiffened up in his seat, a look spreading over his face as if he were a landed duke and one of his serfs had dared address him directly without being spoken to first. Then he crumpled in on himself, as though remembering that the revolution had left him in exile and dependant on distant relations who only sent him money on the condition that he not visit.

Normally I would have shut up and apologized or just left quietly. I go through life trying to attract as little attention as possible, because I am small, female, Asian, etcetera, etc and the wrong person can be anywhere, but I swear I would have choked on it right then. From somewhere inside me came an unwonted hauteur.

I opened my mouth, and what came out was, "You aren't the manager here, are you? You seem rather callow to be a manager."

He stopped. "Uh—no, I'm not."

"Is the manager here?" I asked.

"Yes," the barista said, already looking as though he regretted starting this.

"Could you please ask him or her to come out here for a moment?" I pulled out my tablet phone. "Or shall I call the corporate home office?"

He mumbled something and disappeared behind the counter. I don' t think he'd seen my prosthetics before.

"Joon-Yi, you don't have to—." my friend began.

"I think I kind of have to follow through now that I've started." I told him. I could feel my cheeks getting hot.

The manager, a youngish woman with a number of exciting ear piercings, came over to our table. "Is there something I can help you with?" She looked from Magnussen to me.

"Yes," I bit out. "Your hired hand here came up to us, a senior citizen and a disabled girl, and told us we had to leave because we were having a serious discussion about the mutant issue, using, I might add, our polite indoor voices and without using foul language. There was a distinct threat implied. I would like to know if this is the chain's official policy or just an inappropriate remark on his part? Because if it is corporate policy, the moment I walk out that door," I held up my phone, "an account of this is going all over the internet. And on every social media site I can think of, too."

The manager looked hard at the barista. "It was the opinion of this asshole and had nothing to do with either this location or any part of the chain. I'm very sorry. Allan, apologize and then go clean out the back."

"But—," he protested. "I have a right to my opinion too—."

"Not while you're on the clock, you don't." Her expression said, much more clearly than words: Say it or don't bother coming into work tomorrow.

He caved. "I'm sorry you got offended."

"And I accept your apology," I replied, "in the spirit with which it was made."

As he lumbered off to the back, the manager turned back to us. "Now, can I get a refill for you two of whatever you were drinking? We also have some very nice baked goods that came in fresh this morning."

"I'll take another Earl Grey—and please say you have red velvet cupcakes?"

"Sure do—and you, sir?"

"Another Americano, and perhaps an apricot Danish." Magnussen said, affably.

The moment she was out of earshot, I whispered to him, " I don't believe I did that. Did I really just do that?" I found I was shaking with tension.

"Yes, and quite magnificently as well—You're not having an anxiety attack right now, are you?"

"No, no, I'm okay." I insisted. "But I still don't believe that."

"Do try not to faint," he advised me. "It would ruin the effect."

"I'll keep that in mind." was my retort.

"You should consider unleashing your, ah, hidden dragon more often. It becomes you." he chuckled.

"Yes, well, when I can float weightlessly through bamboo forests and defeat entire armies singlehandedly, I'll do it all the time."

I did not faint, but we never got around to the subject of mutants again. Not that day. On the other hand, when the manager came back with our refills, she also gave us each twenty-five dollar gift cards, to smooth over any remaining hard feelings.

I have to wonder now, though, if he was secretly contemptuous behind that grandfatherly façade. I mean, not only was I a mere human, but a defective one as well. I don't suppose I will ever know.

* * *

><p>AN: Changed the title, because it seemed to fit better. Thanks so much for your review, Evanesce! Yeah, Joon-Yi is, I hope, all those things you said. She's partly based on a disabled girl who took swimming lessons at the same Y I did when I was seven.


	3. Pain and Suffering

it shoudnt hurt like this

it shoudnt hurt where i never had hands

im not an amputee th nerve endings never grew

so i shoudnt have fantom pains

my head isnt good the wall color keep changing

scorpions all over the floor

did he kill me?

is this cancer?

it hurts

* * *

><p>Apparently when I'm off my head in the throes of withdrawal, my spelling, grammar and punctuation go down the toilet. I nearly ripped out that last page, but as it's so indicative of my mental state at the time, I decided to leave it in. After two days of watching me deteriorate, they caved and started letting me have my medication. They also gave me a couple of sets of well-worn hospital scrubs to change into and washed my clothes. After a week of incarceration, my clothes stunk so I couldn't stand myself, and I expect they couldn't stand me either, so the gesture was not an altruistic one.<p>

It also confirms my theory that this isn't Guantanamo. If it were, they'd have given me a prison jumpsuit or something. No, this is a facility of some kind, not a conventional or military prison, and it has some medical function, although I do not like to think of what that might be. This cell has certain peculiarities too.

For one thing, all the surfaces- -walls, ceiling, and floor, are a charcoal grey material, something that's slightly rubbery. It gives when I press on it with my hooks, but the indentation doesn't last. It also seems to absorb light and it's definitely soundproof. More, it is almost burningly cold to the touch, as I discovered when I tried to rest my cheek against the wall. Whatever it is, it practically sucks up heat. The miniscule restroom was cast all of one piece, I think. I can't tell how it's ventilated, but I can feel air circulating, and the lighting is deeply recessed behind very thick Plexiglas. When I get my meal trays, they are passed to me through an airlock type of arrangement, and I have observed, when taken for further questioning, that the door to my cell is at least a foot thick, and it moves very slowly on its hinges.

The conclusion I've drawn from all this is that they have me in a cell designed to contain mutants. What a joke! All this high tech energy absorbent material to keep me cooped up. Talk about overkill.

* * *

><p>After they gave me my pill, I fell asleep as soon as it kicked in. Not because of the paroxetine itself, as it's a drug with no recreational value whatsoever, but because it was such a relief to my system when the withdrawal symptoms stopped. I am quite sure they found this notebook and had a good look at it then, but except for that bit when I was incoherent, I've written it entirely in American English—only using the Korean alphabet. Mom made me take Korean cultural enrichment and language classes until I was thirteen, and finally it's paid off for something! I defy them to find someone who can decipher this.<p>

No, goddamn it, I am not going to get weepy. I am not going to dwell on Mom and Dad and everybody.

I've decided to hide half the pills, so I'll have a stash just in case.

* * *

><p>"So, what was the premise of that ethics paper," he asked me the next week.<p>

By that time, the exact conversation had slipped my mind, so I asked, "Which paper?" I had done several over the semester.

"The one about mutants," he prompted.

"Oh. Right! Um, I don't want to insult the breadth of your knowledge, but how much do you know about the Japanese occupation of Korea during World War Two?"

"I confess my interest was always greater concerning the European theater, so please, go ahead and explain. I am quite intrigued to see how you are going to connect the two." He sat back and regarded me over his coffee.

"During the war, more than two hundred thousand women and girls were tricked, enticed and abducted to serve in Japanese military brothels as 'comfort women'. Some were Japanese or of other nationalities, but most were Korean. It wasn't prostitution, because prostitutes are at least paid, nor slavery, because slaves have value, and these women had none. They were raped dozens of times a day, tortured, ill fed, and ill housed.

" Most of them contracted several sexually transmitted diseases, which went untreated. Diseases of other kinds ripped through them, too. When they became pregnant, they were beaten until they lost the babies. When they died, they were buried without ceremony, and their families never found out what happened to them. Up to three quarters of them died, and those that lived were scarred for life, one way or another. Very few of them could have children afterward, even if they wanted them. Even now, Japan is extremely reluctant to admit, and many still deny, there ever were such a thing as these 'comfort women'. There's been no restitution for the few survivors, no apology, no acknowledgment.

"But the peculiar thing is, the original idea behind the brothels and the 'comfort women' was to prevent rape and abuse of that kind. The reasoning was that the soldiers should have a sanctioned, official outlet in the form of these 'comfort women'—who were all supposed to be paid volunteers—so they would leave the local girls alone." I paused for a sip of tea.

"Nobody in the high command wanted matters to turn out the way they did. It was the exact opposite of what they had planned, but once it was started, they couldn't stop it, and..human nature ran to its worst excesses."

I went on, and this is most ironic, to compare and contrast the action of the Japanese military regarding women to Magneto's own stated intention to prevent mutants from being rounded up, identified, experimented on, and exterminated, beginning with his first public appearance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, continuing up until his disappearance a few years before. Pointing out, too, along the way, exactly how the public opinion of mutants had sunk lower and lower every time he acted or spoke out, exactly how much worse off mutants were afterward. How the mutants who followed him became, over the years, increasingly less righteous and more vicious, fighting not so much for the mutant cause as to get back at the world.

He ought to have gotten angry. Everything I had ever read about him confirmed his vengeful nature, his inclination toward rage. But he did not.

In my mind's eye I can see him so clearly there, framed in the coffee shop window, where imitation snow and fake pine boughs tied with scarlet ribbons reminded the world that it was time to spend lots of money. It was now nearly December. He was making more of an effort, these days, to look less seedy, I thought. He was clean-shaven, not stubbly as he had been the first day I ever saw him, and I was glad he did. Depression in the elderly was an increasing problem. To my eyes, he looked more like an elder statesman, and less like a bum.

"—the worst case of Stockholm Syndrome in history." I prattled on, unaware. I was not the only one who failed to recognize him. How many dozens, even hundreds of people saw him, interacted with him for over a year, as I did? Who among them looked yet did not see, as I did? "When you read what he's said about mutant and humans over the years, all you have to do is substitute 'Aryan' for mutant. You know, people of Jewish descent are nearly as angry about his being a Survivor and Jewish as they are about the conjecture that Hitler was himself part Jewish."

"Enough!" he choked out, and I started, stared at him as he stripped off his jacket and wrested at his sleeve cuff. Pulling it up, he brandished his forearm at me and I saw the numbers there. "DO not—do not speak to me of these things." His face was wet, the tears pooling in the pouches under his eyes.

"Oh! Oh, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean, I never meant—." He was shaking his head, not looking at me, not at all. "I—I have to go." I got to my feet somehow, stumbled a little on my way to the door. I was sure I had lost his friendship forever, and that certainty was a hemorrhaging hole in my stomach. Metaphorically, of course.

I do not make friends easily, as I've said before. I have trust issues, especially where men are concerned. Those not put off by my birth defect are sometimes entirely too into it. Never had I expected that I could become so attached to this elderly man with his courtly demeanor and his way of listening so intelligently. I never had a grandfather—my dad's father died before they adopted me, my mom's father, a year or so afterward. I would have chosen Magnussen as my grandpa in a heartbeat. My life is nothing but proof that the family bonds we choose for ourselves are as strong,_** no**_, they can be even **stronger**, than those Fate hands out to us.

I did not go to the library that next weekend, sure he would not want to see me. (Winter was near enough that the park was now out of the question.) Consequently, I was quite surprised to receive an e-mail from him on Sunday evening.

_Dear Joon-Yi; _

_You need not look so surprised; if you will recall, you showed me once how your ingenious phone worked, and how to send e-mail. I noted then your e-mail address, and although I do not have a computer myself, the library provides them for the use of its patrons, free of charge. _

_I must implore you to forgive me for my outburst last week. Your offence was not made wittingly or maliciously—you simply touched me in a place I had thought long healed over by the years, and I reacted poorly. There are very few people in this world of whom I think well, and you are chief among them. Please do not deprive me of the pleasure of your company. I hope to see you again next week._

_Sincerely,_

_M. Magnussen_

_PS: I recall you told me that 'emoticons' were considered a nuance of e-mail communication, but I cannot remember exactly what one is. Please consider an appropriate one sent._

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><p>A very nice message, really. Charming, amusing, not too obsequious. And, I fear, entirely fake. He had been cultivating me too long to let me slip from the hook so soon. Of course I forgave him. Of course we resumed our games and our post-chess chats.<p>

Of course he continued wooing me for his own ends.

* * *

><p>AN: Unlike written Chinese and Japanese, which rely on thousands of different pictograms, written Korean is based on a phonetic alphabet with fourteen consonants and ten vowels, so writing English with Korean letters would require some very creative spelling and translating it would be challenging.

The 'Comfort Women' as referenced did exist. Unlike Germany, where it is illegal to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, Japan is still trying to gloss that chapter over.

Stockholm Syndrome refers to a mental condition where a prisoner identifies with his captors despite whatever they might be doing to him.

And thank you, Kayla! I hope I will have a few surprises in store for everyone. Reviews are _greatly_ appreciated.


	4. Psychological Torture

Today they tried psychological torture on me.

Unfortunately for them, they took entirely the wrong tack.

_We've discovered something interesting about your real parents, Joon-Yi_.

Which real parents are you referring to? The ones who might not have known each others' names? The ones who gave fake names and left the maternity clinic before I was ten hours old? Or the ones who traveled thousands of miles and went through thousands of dollars not to mention a redwood forest worth of paperwork just to bring me home?

_When it comes to DNA, there's only one set that counts_.

True.

_Magneto knew this too. He had a whole secret lab set up in a concealed room, with a DNA sequencer and everything. That's how we found out._ I have not mentioned them in any detail, because they're so much alike. Same sorts of suits, similar haircuts, slightly different faces with the same expressions.

This time, though, there is someone different. There's a woman seated toward the back, a woman who looks like a Barbie doll come to life, with golden hair and bright blue eyes. She's being very quiet and she's dressed conservatively, but she still stands out. Who is she?

So intent am I on her that I jump when one of them slides a sheet of paper across the table to me. It's sealed in an anti-contamination bag. I know that's what it is because it has red tape marked 'Biohazardous Material' over the opening.

I look at it. It purports to be my DNA profile, each chromosome pair mapped out as bars, some points circled for emphasis. Well, we all shed DNA all the time, on the rims of glasses, when we blow our noses, scratch our heads, comb our hair. It's easy to get a sample of someone's DNA.

I'm not stupid. There are dozens of ways of altering documents, and there is nothing to show this really came from him, or that's it's really mine, or any number of other proofs. Simply putting my name on it and sealing it in a bag proves nothing. However, I don't say that aloud.

Why don't you explain to me exactly what it is I'm looking at? I suggest.

_Your parents have too many points of similarity. Your father was also your grandfather, in other words_.

So? What does that have to do with me? There's nothing wrong with me genetically, and that's the only way that counts. Besides, do you think there's a scenario I haven't considered concerning my origin? Besides, you're hardly a trustworthy source of information. The only way I'd believe that is if an independent lab conducted the test anonymously at my request. It may be true, it may not, and in either case you're deliberately trying to shock and horrify me, and I don't even know why. What do you hope to get out of me? Why am I still being held here in a room designed to hold a high powered mutant?

It is partly a bluff. I know why I am being held. Because I gave him what he wanted.

"If your life were a painting, which one would it be?" he asks me, one day in March. We have known each other for about five months, have played twenty-three games of chess in that time. He still wins, but I am losing more slowly. The wrinkles around his eyes quirk as he glances at me.

"A painting, hmm?" I think about it a moment. "Probably a Magritte. The Treachery of Images. You look at the painting of a pipe, and underneath it, it says, 'This is not a pipe.' First you think, 'What nonsense, of course it's a pipe.' Then you realize, 'No, it isn't a pipe, it's a _painting_ of a pipe. The image is not the thing itself.' Then you think some more, and you realize the word 'pipe' isn't the reality of the thing, and the word for pipe is different in different languages, and a pipe for tobacco is different than a pipe for conducting water. That's me. I am not what people take me to be at first glance."

"A mutant, you mean?" he asks.

"More than that. People see that I'm Asian, and think I probably don't speak or understand English. They see that I'm disabled, and think I must be mentally deficient as well as limb deficient. I could keep going on about it, but you get the idea."

"You challenge their assumptions," he nods. "Having asked you and received such a thoughtful reply, I shall reveal the work of art which best fits me. Pablo Picasso. Guernica."

I knew the work. Painted in response to the bombing of Guernica in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, it was a study of suffering in black, white and grey, a raw, wrenching expression of grief and agony—people, animals, buildings all a-jumble, screaming. Knowing, as I did now, that he was a Holocaust survivor, I understood.

"But at the bottom and the center of it all, there is still a flower blooming," I pointed out, because there was one note of grace and hope in all the war and terror: a single blossom growing out of the ground, despite the broken sword in the dead soldier's hand.

He sighed. "Yes. Hope can be cruel, though. It was in Pandora's Box for a reason, stuck in among all the ills and diseases that plague humanity. When we ought to give up, it keeps us going, leagues and years beyond all rationale."

"You don't have any family?" I asked, for he sounded so desolate and sorrowful.

"Not to speak of. My wife died long ago, and I am estranged from my children, who in turn are childless or estranged from their own children, who I never get to see. My oldest friend of all is dead, and a lady with whom I was in what I believe you would call a 'long-term relationship'—well, I wronged her, grievously and injudiciously. All I have left, (besides a game of chess and a conversation with a friend once a week), is my work, and even that I cannot carry out on the same scale that I once did."

"You know, I don't think you've ever mentioned what you do," I said, hoping to distract him from what was obviously a painful subject.

"No, I haven't, have I?" He perked up at this. "You see before you a semi-retired hybridizer of daylilies."

"Really?" I asked. Somehow I wouldn't have associated him with horticulture, although there was no reason why he couldn't be in that field. "But that's wonderful, to make a living bringing a little more beauty into the world. Tell me more about it—the only named variety I know is Stella D'Oro, and that's because it's everywhere."

He did. Daylilies, when found in the wild, are mainly orange with touches of yellow and red, the kind you can see growing along roadsides nearly anywhere in the U.S. They're very easy to grow and bloom reliably.

But—and this is the crux of the matter—their genes respond very readily to mutation via chemicals, producing exquisite variants, wildly colored, huge or tiny, some with narrow petals, other with wide ones, ruffled and smooth. He talked about the use of colchicines as mutagens as inferior to the effects produced by ethylmethane sulfonate. "I must bring in my scrapbook to show you sometime," he concluded.

"Please do. I'd love to see it," I said. "But you said you're only semi-retired. Don't you live in the city? I would have thought you'd need a lot of land for your plants."

"As long as I have a grow lamp or two and a window box, I can work." he replied. "Would you care for another cup of tea?"

That was the groundwork. It wasn't until the next time that he brought up, while I was looking over the portfolio of daylily photographs, complete with cryptic notes about which plants he'd crossed. "I confess I'm hampered by a lack of understanding about mutation. What causes it? What inhibits it? Why blood red-purple when I'm aiming for pure white?"

"I don't know about what causes it," I said, mesmerized by the intoxicating beauty, all the floral opulence spread out over the pages—I suppose he must have cribbed it together with photo imaging software and photo paper in his printer. No doubt he lied when he said he didn't have a computer. "I might be able to help you with what inhibits it."

"What do you mean?" Oh, how innocent he sounded, when he must have been planning on this moment for months. Had he counted on me offering what I offered, or would he have asked directly?

"Well, there's the Cure for mutants," I said. "We have bottles and bottles of the stuff around the pharmacy. After the first rush, the call for it died down, but the government keeps churning it out and sending it out. It doesn't have a very long shelf life, that's partly why. On the bottle it says three months from the date of manufacture, but they always halve the time for safety. It's good for six. The next time I clear old stock off the shelves, I'll get you a bottle or two. It's not a controlled substance, so no one will care."

"I wouldn't want to put you to any trouble," he demurred. "Or get you into trouble."

"It would be no trouble at all. Anyway, it might not even be of any use to you. There's quite a difference between humans and daylilies, after all."

And so I betrayed my species.

_Perhaps you should read this_. Another page of paper in an anti-contamination bag.

"Just a moment." It is the Barbie doll woman, her hand on the page, holding it down. "You should know that if he still had his powers and you were in his way, he would have destroyed you in a moment just for being an inconvenience. You would have been nothing to him."

"I know," I told her. "More than that, even if I were a mutant, and he were in power, he would have let me die at birth—social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest, and when I was born I was anything but fit. I was in an incubator for months. Yet this fact remains: When he died, I was the only person who missed him, the only one who cared enough to call 911."

The woman straightened up. "Because he destroyed every other relationship he ever had."

She must be the 'long-term relationship'—unless she was his daughter or granddaughter. "Excuse me, I would like to read this." I told her.

The page, hand written and not typed, began:

**Dear Joon-Yi;**

**When you read this I will be gone one way or another. I will almost certainly be dead. There are strange lumps underneath my skin in places which hurt should I press on them. By now you will have learned that I am not who I said I was, that I have deceived you in many ways from almost the beginning, that I am, in fact, Magneto. Or I was, once, before the Cure.**

**Ruined and bereft of my powers, my followers, my resources, I retreated from the fray to try and regroup. Instead I found myself sitting day after day at a chess table in the park, playing whoever might want to hazard a little money on the outcome. You were one of them, nothing much, no more than any of the rest. Until I learned what you did, and a pathway opened in my mind to a future where the Cure was overcome.**

**I needed the Cure in order to create a de-Cure, and to that purpose, I cultivated your friendship. I expected little out of our relationship other than that, steeling myself to endure what I thought would prove inane conversation. I was surprised to find you were more intelligent than I supposed, that you had a very well informed mind and an unusual perspective on the world. I found myself looking forward to our conversations more than the game, and eventually, even more than achieving my goal.**

**I liked you, but I came to respect and admire you even more, for your courage and determination, your maturity and your sense of humor, the depth of your understanding. You were afraid, and rightly afraid, of the dangers you face because of who you are, yet you have not let those fears stop you. In the ethics paper which you told me about, for all that you condemned my actions, you interpreted my motivations exactly, and you had empathy enough to see me as a person and not a monster. Even I have difficulty doing that, when I think over what I have done and what it has led to.**

**I will not live to perfect the de-Cure, but I have forwarded notes and samples of my work to those who will carry on with it, even though they do no know whence the materials came. I regret I could not finish that, but there is one thing in which I can rejoice.**

**It concerns you directly, and requires some little explanation. You see, there are those who carry all the genes which should make them a mutant, but those same genes lie dormant until some catalyst brings them to life. I offer as examples Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and….you. Several months ago, I thieved your teacup and analyzed the DNA you left behind. Your mother must have suffered malnutrition when she carried you; any chemical or radioactive agent would have make you a mutant before your first breath.**

**Before you go out seeking some cosmic event or irradiated animal to bite you, I can also tell you I rendered that unnecessary. Do you recall the tin of tea I gave you over the holidays? It was in there. If I could pick what form your nascent power will take, I would give you flight and the ability to soar weightlessly through bamboo forests or the urban jungles while defeating entire armies singlehandedly. But I cannot, so all I can do is wish that whatever it is, it will be wonderful and fine. You will also be immune to the Cure—your contribution benefits you directly, you see.**

**I shall close by saying this: Powers or not, mutant or not, you are inferior to no one.**

**Yours,**

**Erik Magnus Lensherr,**

**Magneto.**

It was his writing. More than that, it was his style of expressing himself. I would have liked to burst into tears right then, but I stifled my response. I would not break down in front of these anonymous civil servants, and especially not in front of the Barbie doll.

TBC…

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><p>AN: So—Yes, the Barbie doll woman is Mystique, post Cure. You don't think the Feds would just let her go, do you? Were they telling the truth about Joon-Yi being the product of incest? Probably not. As she says, they are not a credible source. Both Magritte's The Treachery of Images and Picasso's Guernica are real, and can be looked at on line if you're interested. Daylilies are indeed hybridized using mutagenic chemicals.

I thank those who reviewed already. I would really appreciate more input, though, because this fic can either end next chapter or go in another direction entirely.


	5. The Worst

"For some reason, though," Barbie doll said, "people who get their powers by accident are still considered human. So congratulations. You get to be a mutant without the stigma."

I did not care for the tone of her voice, and I was close to losing it, so my voice shook a little when I began, "I'm not always good at reading people. Maybe you're being doubly sarcastic, considering my birth defect, and maybe you're not. I have been taken for a mutant my entire life. It would be more accurate to say I had all the stigma and none of the benefits. I won't bore you with a whole list of my woes, because it would be boring and repetitive and take all night, but I'll tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to me."

I took a deep breath, trying to will my heart not to thud so heavily in my chest, to keep sweat from beading at the base of my spine. Let her not know how hard it was for me to speak of it. If I dwelt too long on it, I knew from experience that I would wind up throwing up or passing out. (A very useful skill at times, true, but not a pleasant one.) My voice came out at barely more than a whisper:

"When I was in eighth grade, one day after gym class, six of my classmates, all girls, cornered me in the locker room. They said they knew I was a mutant and they were going to get me before any of my powers developed. Then they stripped off my prostheses—without them I'm, I can't –my nickname all through school was 'Flipper', okay? And not because I'm a graceful swimmer.

"Then they carried me into one of the bathroom stalls, where they forced my head into the toilet and flushed it, over and over. It's called a swirly, which makes the whole thing sound like fun, or just a dumb prank, but the rim of the toilet bowl—they were holding me down so hard, they nearly crushed my windpipe, and my face was underwater. I couldn't—I couldn't get leverage to get up or get away, and besides, I was the smallest kid in class. They knocked out two of my teeth, as well." The vivid spiral of blood flowing from my mouth….

"The other girls in my class stood there and watched—they just watched. Even the ones I thought were my friends. If the assistant gym teacher hadn't come in—I don't suppose they meant to kill me, not really. Alive, I could be tormented over and over again, and if I died, well, that would have been inconvenient. Not to mention difficult to explain. They might have gotten away with calling it just a prank if it hadn't been for knocking out my teeth. That and the bruises I had the next day. " The room started to seem as though it was very far away, like I was viewing it through a long tunnel, and that was a warning sign, so I wrapped it up quickly.

"Luckily my dad's a very good dentist, so you can't even tell which teeth are the implants. The six girls involved got expelled, the girls who just watched got suspended, and I—never went back to that school. That's also when I went on anti-anxiety medication, and I've been on it ever since. My parents found a private school where there was one teacher for every five students, and I just stayed home the rest of the semester until I could start there. It was a school for kids with problems—half the student body was in Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous or both, but that was okay, because I _was _a kid with problems. That wasn't the only incident, but it was the worse. So I rather_ resent_ the implication that I had it easy."

The anonymous agent types were still in the room with us, and I don't think they were any too pleased to have their session with me pre-empted like this, but this was down to she and I now. None of them mattered.

She stared at me with those azure eyes—how had she managed to be so genetically blessed?—nodded, and said, "I apologize."

I nodded back. "And if I were a mutant and had powers, those girls would have been in some serious trouble. Yet I would never have joined Magneto and his Brotherhood , because I studied them. He would've been perfectly fine with people shoving other people's heads down toilets as long as the persons doing the shoving were mutants and the persons getting shoved were not. I myself am of the opinion that nobody should be shoving anybody's head down any toilets, no matter how big, powerful, or numerous they may be."

"Hah!" she snorted. "I think I get it now. Your sense of humor is a lot like his, but you have Charles's philosophy. Erik would have missed having a friendly adversary… There's more to you than you let show."

"Charles?" I asked, trying to place the name. "Charles…Xavier?"

"Yes." she replied.

"You sound as if you knew them well," I observed.

"I should say. I was there from the start, and all the way through."

From the start? I was about to ask her how old she was, or more to the point, _who_ she was, because she had to be one of the involuntarily Cured in that case, but a voice, a female voice came in through speakers. "Miss Darkholme, your interaction exceeds the agreed-on boundaries. You're there to provide insight for us, not to bond with her."

"Okay, Val, okay." Spreading her hands in a gesture of surrender, she backed off.

The anonymous agents took over again. _You understand that we can't have someone like you running around loose_.

"Oh, yes. Because with my history of anti-social behavior I might run rampant and return my library books a day late." I do deadpan very well. I think Barbie snorted again, but I wasn't sure.

_No. Because you're immune to the Cure. Because you were Magneto's last ally. You would be a natural rallying point for the Anti-Cureists_.

"Me? Whatever it was he did, it didn't work! I _don't have any powers_. He gave me a tin of tea, yes, but it was shrink wrapped and everything. I've been drinking it a couple of times a week for two months and nothing's happened. Maybe he made a mistake and gave me the wrong one."

_No. We retrieved the rest of the tea from your condominium and analyzed it. While we don't know what your powers may be, we have you in a cell designed to nullify energy fields. Your brainwaves show abnormal activity over the last several days_.

"Well, _yes_, my brain waves show abnormal activity! I've been withdrawing from paroxetine, which is a lot like heroin withdrawal only not nearly as much fun. Listen—." Then the gravity of the situation bore down on me. "You plan to hold me here for the rest of my life."

_You won't be mistreated. You haven't been up until now, have you?_

"I certainly appreciate that you haven't physically tortured me. I don't think I could bear up very well under that. But what about my family? They'll be searching for me. I know them. They'll be on the news and organizing people—."

_Your family believes you are dead. While you were sedated in preparation to transferring you here, we staged a viewing of your 'body' in the morgue, via closed circuit camera, of course. Since you perished in the spill of biohazardous materials at the apartment building, it would not have been safe for them to get any nearer. You were cremated, and they interred your remains two days ago._

_For what it is worth, their grief was considerable_.

"'For what it's worth'? You think I don't know they loved me?" It seemed to me that this was one of those times when suddenly either fainting or throwing up would get me out of that room and I really wanted to be elsewhere right then. So I took a deep breath and let myself remember the smell, the feel of the rim crushing my throat, and I was so worked up, it took hardly any time at all.

I came to here on my bunk. So: I am being held prisoner, sentenced to life for having made the wrong friend. This sentence is to be carried out in solitary confinement, too. No one knows I'm here and everyone who cares about me believes I am dead. At present, I am being treated humanely, but that could change when the administration changes, or even before, if some unknown person somewhere decides I am not worth keeping alive. The one real bond I formed outside of my family, Erik/Magnussen/Magneto, is dead, and while I can now grieve for him—the rubbery grey floor drinks up my tears without so much as a crust of salt left behind—he also blessed and cursed me at the same time. I have not shown any signs of any powers, not that I can tell, anyway.

At one time in my life, the weeks after the toilet incident, this would have been an ideal situation for me. I didn't have to go out, I didn't have to deal with people, even with my family. I didn't have to work for a living. Nobody expected anything of me.

But that was long, long ago, and I grew out of that. I want my life, I want my freedom. I want to do daring things and wear fun clothes and say all the things I never have because it would call too much attention to me. I want to flirt and go out dancing and even sing karaoke with a whole bunch of friends.

I want to have powers, whatever they might be, and not be afraid of anything or anyone.

I think I'll stop writing for now. I can't think of another thing to say. I can't think of anything to do.

* * *

><p>AN: However, I can think of lots more things for Joon-Yi to do, but the almost total silence concerning this fic is discouraging. I'd like to send her back in time to bring her unique perspective to the events of First Class, but I need to know if people would want to read it. Thank you to those who are, especially Kayla.


	6. Ghost Stories

They've given me his letter to keep, and although I'm not sure of their motives, I am glad to have it. It was found, I am told, in an envelope marked, 'For Joon-Yi Kaplan, to be opened in the event of my death or disappearance.' In turn, the envelope was tucked inside a book on his bedside table, a collection of Korean folktales. I asked if it was tucked in at a story called 'Jangwha and Hongryeon', and they said, yes, how did you know?

Because I told it to him once.

* * *

><p>"…so my full birth name is Song Joon-Yi. Song is the family name my genetic mother gave when she entered the clinic, but her ID turned out to be fake. I usually tell people 'Joon-Yi' means 'Rose Peony', should they ask."<p>

"But it means something else?" he asked. "'Rose Peony' is very pretty, but it's also…fluffy, if I may put it that way. You are not a fluffy person."

"Thank you. I'm glad to hear I'm not fluffy. Yes, it is a frou-frou name," I agreed. "But it's better than the real thing. As it's written in Hanja script, 'Joon', means true, honest or pure, and 'Yi' means 'different, abnormal or strange', so my name means 'Truly Strange' , 'Truly Different', or not to put too fine a point on it, 'Pure Abnormality', which may be accurate but is also unkind."

"I think 'Truly Different' suits you, actually. You _are_ truly different in a number of ways. Your intelligence, your charm, your loveliness…" he said with a twinkle. If he had been fifty years younger I would have taken it for flirtation instead of gallantry, and seized up like a clam.

"You are being far too kind," I said. I am neither particularly charming or lovely. Intelligent I will admit to.

His eyebrows flew up in astonishment. "No one has ever accused me of that before!"

We laughed, and I went on. "My folks wanted me to have some kind of connection to my birthplace, which was why they didn't change my name. If they knew what it really meant at the time, they might have changed it after all. It's on record that my name nearly was Jangwha, which_ does_ mean 'Rose Peony' or 'Rose Blossom' but the nurse-midwife objected when my genetic mother chose it, so she crossed it out and wrote Joon-Yi instead. Calling me Jangwha there would be like naming me Cinderella or Gretel here. Not that 'Truly Strange' is an improvement."

"A name out of fairytale?" He raised his cup. "Is there a wicked stepmother and a happy ending?"

"Actually, yes, there is a wicked stepmother and, if you believe in reincarnation, a happy ending. Would you like to hear it?"

"Please, by all means."

I settled back in my seat. "I have to warn you, it's more of a ghost story than anything else, and it's gruesome."

"As all the best ghost stories are. Pray proceed."

"All right. This is the story of Jangwha and Hongryeon.

"Once upon a time, there was a farmer named Bao, and one night his wife dreamed an angel came to her and gave her a beautiful rose-colored peony. She proved with child, and nine months later gave birth to a baby girl who they named 'Rose Peony', or Jangwha. A couple of years later, they had another girl, who they named 'Red Lotus', or Hongryeon, and they were very happy. But their mother died when Jangwha was only five years old, and Bao married again, for a farmer needs sons. Girls cannot quite earn their keep by working in the fields, and then there are dowries to find for them.

"But his second wife was as different from the first as sand is different from rice. She hated her stepdaughters, but she was clever enough to conceal it until she had born three sons, which made her position unassailable. She began to abuse the girls, beating them and starving them. But in the meantime, Jangwha had come of marriageable age, so Bao told his wife to make ready for her betrothal and wedding.

"The wicked woman could not bear to think of one of her victims escaping her alive, so she plotted against Jangwha. Catching a rat, she killed it and skinned it, hiding it in Jangwha's bed and smearing the bedclothes with blood. Then she called her husband to come and see. 'Jangwha is unchaste and a whore. She had a secret lover, and this is the child she miscarried,' Bao could not help but think his wife told the truth, and as miserable as Jangwha's life was before, the disgrace and shame made her ten times more. Poor girl, she tried to run away, but her stepmother learned of it, and she summoned her eldest son.

" 'Follow your sister,' she told him, 'and when it is convenient, at the first opportunity, do away with her.' The boy, being like his mother in all ways, did, coming across Jangwha as she bathed her sore feet in the shallows of a lake and drowning her. Leaving the body in the water, he went home, but along the way a huge tiger sprang out and attacked him as mercilessly as he attacked his sister, mauling him so he lost the use of one arm and one leg.

"Despite the injury done to her son, which was the punishment of Heaven for the evil he had done at his mother's behest, the stepmother did not repent, but continued to mistreat Hongryeon until she was so miserable she drowned herself in the same lake where her beloved sister died. Rejoicing, the stepmother claimed that Hongryeon too had been unchaste, and drowned herself before her disgrace could be found out like Jangwha's.

"However, there were strange lights seen over the lake at night, and strange sounds echoed over the water. It began to gain the reputation of a haunted place. Then the mayor of their village died suddenly—and his house was close by the lake. Another mayor was appointed, and he died the same way, and then another and another. Finally, the village had to look outside for a new mayor, for no one wanted to die.

"The man they chose was young, but he was shrewd and learned. On his first night as mayor, while he was reading the Analects, his candle went out all by itself, although he was alone in the room and there was no breeze other than his own breath. Out of the darkness welled up a strange greenish light, and by he saw the faces of two young girls, dressed in sopping wet garments, their hair disheveled and wild. He was as brave as he was shrewd, and he stood his ground. 'Who are you, and what do you want?' he asked.

"The girls, for of course they were the ghosts of Jangwha and Hongryeon, told him of the treachery of their stepmother, and how they had died. He listened, and he knew by their strength that they told the truth, for only the ghosts of true virgins could be so powerful. (Virgins make the worst and most powerful ghosts," I explained, "because of all their unexpended life energies.) He promised them they would have justice, and they departed without harming him.

"In the morning—and everyone was mightily surprised to see him still alive—he rose and went to Bao's house, where he demanded to see the fetus Jangwha had miscarried. When it was brought forth, he cut it open with a knife and, examining it, found it was not a human fetus at all. 'Bao,' he said, 'your daughters were never unchaste. Rather, they were slandered and done to death by these two wretches,' gesturing to the stepmother and the eldest son. 'So they have told me, and here is the proof of it.'

"The wicked stepmother and her eldest son were put to death, but Bao and his younger sons were spared, because they had been deceived rather than malicious. Bao, being in need of a mother for his boys, soon married a third time, and on his wedding night, he dreamt of his daughters. 'Now that all has been put right, honored father, we want to come back to you.' Nine months later, twin girls were born to Bao and his new wife. They named them Jangwha and Hongryeon, and they all lived happily ever after."

Magnussen repeated the last four words with me, as in a ritual. "A very effective little tale. Quite as chilling as the original Grimm or Andersen tales. How did you come across it?"

"On line," I told him. "It's been made into a movie several times. Of course when I read the title and saw my almost-name, it got my attention, so after I saw the movie I looked it up. In America, they released it under the title A Tale of Two Sisters. It's an amazing movie, as atmospheric and creepy as all get-out, with a double whammy ending. Just when you think it's all due to one character suffering from multiple personality disorder, you find out there really is a ghost. I read it when I was angriest, though, so my first reaction to the fairytale was, 'Great. My birthmom took one look at me and thought of a skinned rat.' To be fair, I was a very ugly baby."

"I would hope she thought of Jungwha's eventual rebirth and happiness." he said, gently.

"That would be a nice thought," I said, "but considering the name I wound up with, I fear it was the skinned rat. It's all right, though. I can laugh about it now."

"You laugh because it hurts, not because it doesn't," he said, suddenly harsh, but his voice softened as he said. "Believe me, I of all people comprehend."

* * *

><p>I've never been very comfortable with the idea of reincarnation. The idea that two people can be siblings in one life, parent and child the next, lovers the life after, even if clothed in different flesh—is creepy.<p>

* * *

><p>I am informed that female inmates of childbearing age are issued twelve sanitary pads a month. While not generous, it seems adequate, until I consider that I menstruate every twenty-eight days, thirteen times a year. So what do I do when my thirteenth period comes around?<p>

It's depressing that I have to face that.

* * *

><p>My story about what happened in the locker room earned me a session with the resident shrink. I have not mentioned before that whenever they move me out of my cell for whatever reason, there are four big guards with tranquilizer guns pointed at me the whole time. Including during this session, making a mockery of patient confidentiality. With all the other rights violations, though, I expect they don't even blink about this one. So we talked about the incident, and I explained that I was actually quite well adjusted, thank you, and a functional human being. He asked me if there were any other concerns, and I said, well, yes. I found my current circumstances somewhat depressing but since it seemed things would be staying that way for the foreseeable future, I would appreciate having something to read, to divert my mind and keep me from dwelling on my situation.<p>

He responded by telling me he believed lithium would do me more good, and he would start me on fifteen hundred milligrams tonight.

My jaw dropped. That's not just an expression, either. "_Lithium_? I'm not bipolar, and nothing in my records or anything I've said today indicates that I am! The only other use for lithium is to augment the treatment of unipolar depression, and that's taken as a last resort because lithium is so toxic. I'm on paroxetine, and it manages my condition just fine. What's more, lithium dosage is determined by body weight and you start the patient on a low dose and increase it slowly over several weeks. You're proposing a dose that's appropriate for someone a third larger than I am who's thoroughly used to it! I have enough problems without adding renal failure to them, thank you!"

"How do you know all that?" he spluttered.

"Didn't you read my file?" I am sure I have a file. Bureaucracies are good at nothing so much as generating files. "If you had, you'd know I have a doctorate in pharmacology and have been a licensed, practicing pharmacist for almost four years."

"Most mutants don't even have their high school equivalency," he half-accused me. "You're the first one I've ever met with any kind of degree."

"That is no excuse for not reading a new patient's files," I informed him. "Listen: I am a real person. Up until very recently, I had a condo, a car, a full-time job, and a life."

"Take her out of here," he told my guards. It is no use. I am only a shade now. Just a ghost.

* * *

><p>I don't suppose the best and brightest wind up treating mutants of questionable criminality in an underground compound in an undisclosed location. It seems like a dead end job to me, somewhere you send those that are too adequate to fire but not good enough to promote.<p>

* * *

><p>Every other day I am taken to an exercise room where I get to ride on a stationary bike for an hour and a half. Wa-freaking-hoo.<p>

* * *

><p>If only I could have something <em>living<em> in this cell with me, a canary or a hamster, a beta fish or even just an African violet plant. Something to nurture. Something to love.

* * *

><p>My request for books has been granted. I can have two at a time, exchanging them through the airlock like my meal trays. They don't seem to come from any facility library that I can tell, being too random and eclectic a mix for that. I suppose they pick from whatever people have on their office shelves. Somebody is heavily into reliving the Sixties. Their glory days, or nostalgia for a time that seems so much better than what we have going now? Someone else just reads whatever fiction is on the bestseller list. Boring. Another has all of Stephen King. No matter: if it has words in a line, I will read it.<p>

* * *

><p>I was in another session with the psychiatrist today—he abandoned the lithium idea immediately, not that I would have taken it. While it was going on, the lights went out, and immediately four trank gun muzzles were pressed against my throat and chest. "Don't move," one of my guards growled.<p>

"What's going on?" I asked.

"I don't know," replied the psychiatrist. From the sounds of things, he was rummaging around in his desk, and a moment later there was a thin beam of light. Shining the penlight around, he made his way to the door.

Shortly after that, someone came by, and I heard, "Total outage, even the backup… some equipment they brought in yesterday, seized from somewhere,… don't know…say that one of the guards has gone missing." All of that was delivered in a half-whisper.

"…sure it was the equipment and not one of the muties?"

"In _this_ place, who can tell?"

The lights went back on, and they shut up. "Where exactly is this place?" I inquired.

"Shut up," said one of my guards.

Intriguing, though. What is so odd about this place?

* * *

><p>My salad today was half-spoiled. Slimy brown bits of lettuce throughout. Is there any point in complaining?<p>

* * *

><p>This self-imposed reduction of my paroxetine intake leaves me feeling perpetually just a little uncomfortable. I have some slight withdrawal symptoms, especially in the hour or two before the next dose. I am not miserable, only uncomfortable. I am of two minds about continuing to take it. On the one hand, withdrawal symptoms can persist for months, even a year or more, and the underlying condition for which I take it is not going to go away magically. But I have been on it for about half my life, and I've lived with its side effects for so long they've become my normal. What would life off it be like?<p>

* * *

><p>Last night, the power went out again, and <em>this<em> time, guards came and rousted everyone out of their cells, several dozen sleepy mutants and Cured mutants rounded up and herded up and outdoors. I was afraid this was it, that I and everyone else was going to be taken out behind the chemical sheds or somewhere and shot, but oh, once I got up to the surface and saw the stars! Breathing in fresh air for the first time in weeks, I nearly felt drunk. Then the cold hit me through the thin scrubs. It was freezing, or nearly, and no wonder. We are out in the desert somewhere. Hopping and dancing in place to try and get warm, I got warned to stay still.

"We're here—wherever here is—in the middle of a desert, with coyotes and snakes and spiders out there. I'm dressed only in scrubs and slippers, with no water, no food, no money, no coat, no phone, no nothing, and _you're_ worried that I'm going to _run off_? Hardly."

"Joon-Yi?" someone called. "Is that you?" It was a woman and I thought I knew who.

I hopped up and down—why is everyone so damn tall?—and caught a glimpse of icy yellow. Blonde hair lit by moonlight. "Ms—um, Blackwood?"

"Darkholme!" she called back. "Raven Darkholme!"

"Where are we and what's going on?" I yelled.

We were both told to shut up, but fire drills, or whatever this was, always have an element of anarchy. "It's Area 51!" she hollered. "So who knows?" Unfortunately the power came back on and we were all herded back in. I do wonder why we all had to leave the facility. What could be so bad inside that they would risk taking us all outside?

I do not believe they acted out of any concern for our safety.

* * *

><p>While in the exercise room today I heard one guard whisper to another that one of the staff went missing during the first power outage and reappeared during the second—embedded in solid rock. Dental records confirmed his identity, but carbon dating said he'd been there for twenty thousand years. Rumor, truth, or just a ghost story?<p>

* * *

><p>AN: Wow, thanks for all the encouragement and support! It makes me _very_ happy. A Tale of Two Sisters is a movie any horror fan should see. You will love it. Also, J-Horror Girl PM'd me to tell me with great glee that there is a Japanese horror movie called Mutant Girl Squad where the heroine's hands turn into robotic claws when her powers emerge, but that she finds refuge from mutant haters among her own kind in an elite all-girl all-mutant team. However, as some of them have Wolverine-like retractable swords in their breasts (eeewwww!) and anal chainsaws, (double eewww!) there really is no resemblance between that movie and this fic. Just thought I'd share that with you.

If I have made any errors with either the Korean language or in relating the story of Jangwha and Hongryeon, it is unintentional.


	7. Delusional, Or?

Still no signs of any powers. Perhaps the paroxetine is acting as a suppressant? It has enough side effects that one more wouldn't be a huge surprise. If there's one thing I know, it's that the 'rare' side effects reported by 1 percent or less of the test group occur, in the real world of patient treatment, like snowflakes in a blizzard. If there were a medication that could suppress powers temporarily, long enough to get someone past brain scans—but I have no empiric proof, and vague speculation on my part means less than nothing. I'm going to halve my dosage again, and see what happens.

* * *

><p>I haven't written anything for a while. What is there to write about? The third book about the Kennedy assassinations? That they changed the brand of chocolate pudding that's served for dessert once a week, and the new kind is grainy and watery? I am depressed, I know that, and I know why. I challenge the most psychologically healthy person in the world to be imprisoned as I am here, and not be depressed! Yet I know these are humane conditions, that it could be so much worse. This is no concentration camp. I am not abused, starved, or tortured. Yet at any time it could be otherwise.<p>

I and every other inmate here could still, and at any time, be taken out and put to death. Indeed, I do not know why we are not. Perhaps it has something to do with Dr. Henry McCoy, the Secretary of Mutant Affairs. He is, has been for years, the government's token good mutant, a great blue furry teddy-bear of a intellectual who one cannot imagine would hurt so much as a fly. He's like Bill Cosby, paternal, funny, friendly, unthreatening. Cuddly. Yes, he must know of this place and who is held here, in general if not in detail. _That's_ why we are still alive.

He's why the Cure hasn't been made absolutely mandatory, I'm sure.

Although, after that first rush of Curing, the greatest demand for it has been as a sort of inoculation—parents bringing in their kids to be injected. When will it become mandatory for all school-age children to be injected with the Cure before they can enter kindergarten?

I don't ask _if_ it will become mandatory. I ask _when._

* * *

><p>My pixie cut has grown out to the point where it covers my ears completely and strands of it even get caught on the lip balm I smear on my lips. That is how long I have been here, long enough for the shortest cut to grow out to chin length. How long is that? Six months? Maybe less. My hair grows rather fast, or at least it seems to, being straight as string. I always wanted hair like my sisters, curly and full, because then I would look like the rest of my family. At the same time, unbeknownst to me, they always wanted hair like mine. Sara and Isabel—I know they weren't crazy about having a adopted sister with 'special needs' foisted on them, but by the time I was old enough to understand that, they were reconciled to having me around. Thank you, Sara. Thank you, Izzy. I love you and I miss you.<p>

* * *

><p>All right. This is something I <em>can<em> put down, a quote from that book on the Kennedy assassinations. 'Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, had ties to the underworld that lead directly through his friends, restaurateurs Sam and Joe Campisi, to Joseph Civello, to the mysterious Sebastian Shaw, owner of the Hellfire Clubs, a short-lived competitor of the Playboy franchise. Although Shaw reportedly died of a brain embolism on October 27, 1962, (the very day the Cuban Missile Crisis reached its peak), the extent of his influence has never truly been understood.'

Leaving aside the issue of how a man dead almost exactly seven months could possibly have that much to do with the assassination of JFK, I recall very well that Magnussen said, in reference to a point I made in my ethics paper, "You're wrong. Magneto was not the first. There was Sebastian Shaw, who owned the Hellfire Clubs in Las Vegas and elsewhere. But he's been forgotten." And who would know better than Magneto himself?

Shaw has not been entirely forgotten, apparently. But there is nothing here to indicate that Shaw was a mutant, as Magnussen implied. Was it not known? There weren't any genetic tests back then. The only way you could tell if someone were a mutant, until very recently, is if they looked different, suddenly began exhibiting powers, or if you hooked them up to a EKG and got the wrong readings.

And given the connection I've drawn between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the anti-mutant sentiment, I cannot believe Shaw's death, on that day of all days, can be a coincidence. 'Reportedly' died of a brain embolism? Something shady is going on there. 'Brain embolism' may well be a euphemism for 'a bullet to the head.'

Someone is at the door. Why?

* * *

><p>All right. They're messing with me now. An hour of observation as I showed off my dexterity, performing a increasingly difficult series of tasks designed to test how 'handy' I am. The final test was threading a very fine needle with even finer thread. I went along with it because it was something different. When it was over, they thanked me, and asked me if I wanted to be part of a program to evaluate new models of prostheses for soldiers who had lost limbs in combat.<p>

"The cases aren't equivalent," I replied. "I'm not an amputee. I was born this way, and I've worn prostheses for longer than I can remember. Of course I'm going to be more dexterous than someone who's just lost a limb. Also, hand and arm prosthetics are still back in the dark ages, compared to what they're making for the lower limbs. Amputee runners are banned from certain races because they can actually do better with their artificial feet and calves than fully intact athletes—metal and plastic never get tired and they have more spring than living meat and bone."

_We're making progress along those lines. Prostheses for feet and legs __**are**__ several generations ahead of hand and arm prostheses, but without the willing help of qualified persons like yourself, it will be even longer before we catch up._

"'Qualified persons?' Hm. I might be willing to participate—but where is my cheese?"

Your cheese?

"You give lab rats cheese for running the maze, don't you, to keep them active and involved? What incentives are you offering me, beyond the abstract of helping injured troops?"

_What would you like—which we can reasonably provide, that is?_

I thought fast. When I actually got fresh fruit and vegetables in my diet, more often than not, they were half spoiled—but that was too small a thing to ask for, too petty. A pet or a plant? No. "An e-reader and fifty dollars worth of e-books for every hour I spend evaluating." Not the best phrased way of asking for it, but I was taken by surprise.

They conferred for a moment. _Why?_

"Because I would like more say in what I read."

What is more, I now have it. (Perhaps I should have asked for more. This was rather easy.) I am to send it out to be recharged as I used to send out books to be exchanged. I can only order books with it—they disabled the other internet features. I will not be summoning the cavalry this way.

Spent a couple of hours trying prostheses today. None of them was a prototype—all were versions I have tried, some of them several years ago. Commented on this—they seemed surprised, then one said they wanted to review what was already available before moving into new territory.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. I smell a dead fish. Metaphorically.

* * *

><p>This is so strange it beggars belief and defies description. I am…I think I am free and writing this in a motel room which is only one or two steps above a rent-by-the-hour joint. Three possibilities spring to mind: One, I am hallucinating due to paroxetine withdrawal or I have gone clinically insane, (that counts as one possibility, not two) and this is an extremely complete and detailed delusion. Two, this is some form of mind control, and I only think I'm here. Three…<p>

Three, this _is_ September 1961, and I have traveled back in time. What I would like to know is, who builds a time machine into a prosthesis? For that is how I got here, provided this is here and not all in my head one way or another.

For two weeks, they had me trying various arms, working up to the last. Which showed more brains that I gave them credit for, as if I had seen that huge monstrosity on the table the first day, I would have balked. It looked…well, something like that liquid mercury Terminator' arm crossed with Hellboy's. There it lay, all gleaming chromium and muscular strength—I mean, it was thicker and more sculpted than that of Michelangelo's David.

"What is that?" I asked, gawking at it. There was a thin, high pitched whine in my head which I ascribed to paroxetine withdrawal, (I am down to half a pill a day) but the more I looked at that arm, the more intense it got.

_The latest generation. Something that should respond to thought and transmit sensation_.

"It's—very large."

_Many servicemen are large, and this was designed accordingly_, one lied. _It has its own internal power sources, and it should be light enough once you get it on. It will adjust itself to fit_.

"This much? Besides, it goes all the way up to the shoulder. My arms go all the way to the elbow." The lighting in the room was oddly dim, and it pulsed in time with the whine in my head. All the signs were there, and I ignored them.

_It will adjust itself to fit_, he repeated.

"All right," I said. I unstrapped my left arm, put it in my lap, and put my stump in the maw of the beast.

There was a very strange moment when I thought I hung by my wrists—the wrists I do not have—from shackles on the outer wall of a high stone tower, and the blood ran down my arms. Then I cowered in the corner of a room while fire licked at my skirts. I writhed to birth a baby that was too large for my narrow pelvis, and icy waters covered my head as I sank beneath chunks of ice. Someone held up a gun, pulled the trigger, and my skull shattered. I died a hundred, a thousand deaths, murdered, starved, stricken by disease, slashing my own throat. I was male, I was female, I was a child, I was very old.

Then I was in the same room, but it was empty, save for a few old-fashioned desks with blocky plastic dial phones and huge metal typewriters. I sat down very abruptly, because someone had yanked the chair out from under me, but nobody was there. I was entirely alone. I did not have on that enormous metal arm, but my prosthetic clattered to the floor as I righted myself, so I put it back on.

"Um—hello?" I called out. Getting up, I investigated. According to various papers on and in the desks, letterheads and invoices and such, I was in the accounting department of—Lockheed Martin? And it was September, which could well be true, as I lost track of the days and months. But it was September of 1961. Finding somebody's stash of crackers, I got a paper cup of water from the bottle in the corner, sat down, and had a think. Luckily I had this notebook in my pocket, and luckier still, I was wearing the clothes I had on when I was abducted, including shoes.

TBC…

* * *

><p>AN: So…Many, many thanks to Paxus, whose suggestion inspired exactly how Joon-Yi gets back to the past. The mysterious equipment which was causing power outages and unusual temporal effects is the arm, which Homeland Security got hold of by means as yet unknown. Whether she is right about the effects of her medication on her powers—well, she had her notebook in her pocket when she made the time jump, but she didn't have her medication, and it won't be developed for several decades, so she's going cold turkey now. Good thing she's been tapering off!


	8. Hellfire

Perhaps most fortunate of all, though, I have my e-reader, freshly charged and loaded with a consolidated digest of several major newspapers from 1957 through 1967, five years before and five years after the reported death of Sebastian Shaw. I downloaded it to search for other, more contemporary references to him. However, in addition to news articles, it includes election results, stock market reports, sports scores, racetrack results. I've always wanted powers. Maybe my mutant powers are shy about putting in an appearance, but knowledge is power, too. If I can't turn that to my advantage, then I don't deserve it.

Since the recharger has been left behind (or is that ahead?) in 2013, I've got to be frugal with it.

Oh, this is going to be fun! It occurs to me that this euphoric state I'm in is not a normal reaction, that I shouldn't be so happy and fearless and free.

Of course, I _could_ just sit down on the floor, close my eyes, assume a fetal position and start rocking back and forth while chanting 'LALALA THIS IS NOT REALLY HAPPENING LALALA'.

How boring that would be, though! If I were going to retreat into catatonia, I might as well still be stuck in my cell. My mission is clear. I must find Sebastian Shaw, insinuate myself into his cabal, find out what it is he's going to do that begins the cycle of hatred and revulsion against mutants, and stop it.

Dozens and dozens of sci-fi movies, TV shows, and very, very clichéd books can't be wrong, can they?

Well, yes, they can, but what the hell else have I got going on?

Anyhow, after breaking into the Lockheed Martin cafeteria cashbox and getting out of Area 51 in the trunk of someone's car, I bought a bus ticket to Vegas, where I am now. All that I know about Las Vegas, I learned from watching CSI (which I enjoy for the science, and _not at all_ because of George Eads' boyish grin and adorable butt.) If I were to go by that, the local citizens around here live for nothing except murdering each other or getting murdered in any number of creative and forensically challenging ways.

It is probably not wise to take that literally, but you never know.

Tomorrow I plan to go to the Hellfire Club. It's a 'gentleman's club', like the Playboy Clubs used to be—and this is an era where that means something other than naked dancers spinning around a pole upside down. What exactly will I do there?

I have an idea or two, ones which I should find repugnant, and would have before. But somehow the old rules I made for myself don't apply any more. I'm free.

Time to find out what that means.

* * *

><p>November 1961 (two months later):<p>

Sebastian Shaw looked at the new Matisse painting adorning his Las Vegas office wall, and smiled. "Up a little more on the right," he instructed his lackey. "Perfect. Thank you, Azazel." Glancing at his companion, Emma Frost, he caught her frowning at the two-way mirror which looked into the Hellfire Club. "You don't care for Matisse?" he challenged her. "It was a gift from the Kremlin."

"That hostess," Emma remarked instead of replying, tapping the glass with a manicured finger. "Take a look at her."

Shaw looked. "Which one, my darling Emma?", he asked sardonically.

The Hellfire Club combined aspects of a casino, a bar, a restaurant and a brothel. Shaw had learned early on that having the female waitstaff service the members in _every_ way was an unworkable idea—one member could tie up a waitress (literally sometimes) for half an hour or more, and that meant a dozen other members were going without food and drink. The club now employed waitresses and hostesses while relying on call girls for the more intimate entertainment, and to avoid confusion, the regular employees wore head bands with sparkly red devil horns and matching devil tails. Looking for the signature headdresses, Shaw scanned the crowd.

"The Asian girl," Emma said, tapping again.

Shaw looked. She stood out, first because Asian employees were rare in his club, second because instead of a bustier, panties and stockings, she wore an abbreviated school girl's uniform, complete with short-short plaid skirt, white knee socks, and platform-soled Mary Janes, and thirdly—.

"Wait a moment. She's maimed." he spat, offended. "What the hell is that manager thinking, hiring a cripple, no matter how cute she is?"

"She's not a cripple," Emma gave him a oblique glance from her lovely eyes. "Or not only a cripple, anyway. She's a mutant."

"Well,_ is_ she now?" That was a different story. Yes, on watching her closely, he noticed how fresh and lively she was in comparison to the plodding human girls around her . "The atom sometimes takes away even as it gives. And what gift did it give her?"

Emma's brow creased ever so slightly in concentration. (Excess emotion made for wrinkles.) "I'm not sure…She's very hard to read. I can only get surface stuff. There's something like static interference. Ohhh!" she exclaimed. " I see. She has a _very _strong energy field around her. Strong but contained. I can't tell what it does."

"Then can you tell me what's going on around her?"

"Of course," Listening through others' ears, Emma eavesdropped, relaying what she heard to Shaw.

* * *

><p>"Senator!" the girl exclaimed. "I'm so glad you came in tonight. Congratulations on that appropriations bill. I read an account of your speech in the Post." Her English was perfect and unaccented.<p>

The senator's was not, or not quite. "Jimmy, this here lil' gal is Jenny Song, and she's sharper than a whole box o' tacks. If yore membership's approved, you gotta make sure you allus tip her good, cause she'll tip ya back." Reaching inside his jacket, he took out a folded bill. "Jenny, hunny, you were sure right about that DuPont stock, and I just gotta give ya a lil' extra up front, afore I hit the tables."

She made the money disappear down the front of her crisp little sailor blouse. "Thank you _so _much, sir. I'll keep my ears open and see if I can't come up with something new for you by the time you leave."

"I'd appreciate that right well, hunny. Now, can you find us a table so's we can get some food in us afore we start having too much fun?" he chuckled.

"Of course!" She led them up the stairs, chatting conspiratorially as they followed. "I shouldn't say so, but the lobster Thermidor isn't all it could be tonight. However, the game hens we just got in have been raised on blueberries, and they're amazing. If you prefer red meat, the steaks are from a side of Black Angus that was hung _really well_…" The last remark could have been either innocent or innuendo; neither her expression nor her intonation gave anything away. Seating them, she summoned a waitress and frisked away, almost skipping. Under the skirt were white cotton panties, clean and pure as fresh snow.

"South Korean born," the senator said in reply to his guest's question. "Lost her hands in the War. Damn shame, but she's a plucky lil' gal and there's no vice in her, no matter that she works here. Now, that game hen sounded mighty tempting…"

* * *

><p>Whether it was an act or a fact, the persona she projected was a mix of cheerful impertinence and demure virtue. And, incongruously, savvy about the stock market, the horse races, and whatever other sports a man might bet on. Not all the members were as friendly or respectful as the senator—some whispered, stared, made her perform small and meaningless tasks so they could gawk at how she lit matches, poured water without spilling a drop or breaking a glass with her hooks. Quite a few of them patted her ass in passing, a gesture she seemed to take in stride. When pinched, however, she playfully scolded the offender that she might very well pinch back, clashing her hooks in demonstration and warning. And always there was money, flowing from the men to her. Not ones and fives, either.<p>

"If the last twenty minutes is any example, she's going to pull down five hundred dollars tonight. Maybe more," Emma remarked. "And all without getting her knees dirty, too." The average yearly salary for a man, the breadwinner of a family, was less than six thousand dollars. A new car might cost about three thousand, a gallon of gas, twenty-five cents. For a woman to make, in one night, a tenth of what a man might in a year—was noteworthy.

"And half of that goes right to the house, too." Shaw pointed out. "If she's honest, that is."

"She'll be honest," Emma predicted. "Her public image would be tainted if she held out on the club, and she's too smart a player for that. That's not her power at work here—take it from me. A woman knows things about another woman without ever having to read her mind. She's older than she looks; her size helps put across the illusion. She'll be able to pull off this act for a few more years if she keeps out of the sun and doesn't drink or smoke."

Shaw smiled like a wolf looking at a field of lambs. "The question is, how did this little evolved treasure walk straight into our fold without our having to going out and hunt her down? I confess I have a burning curiosity about Miss Jenny Song. Emma, why don't you call in the general manager so I can ask him?"

The Hellfire Club's general manager was upward of fifty and Italian-American. He had been in the restaurant business in one capacity or another for over thirty years, often in places with Mob connections, and he wasn't dead yet, which spoke well for his competence and his tact. When questioned about the hostess, he admitted he had had his misgvings about Jenny Song, _even though Shaw had told her she should apply there_, but that she had proven she could wait tables as well as anyone. In fact, she had a definite talent for customer service and showed initiative in ways no one else did, such as creating card files on members' likes and dislikes. She knew what would go over well, such as her outfit, and she was hard-working, honest, dedicated, and brought in more tips than any other girl. When the hostess position opened, he had had no hesitation in promoting her, even though she was newest.

Shaw had shown no reaction when he was told he had met her and advised her to apply for a job at the club, although he knew full well he had done nothing of the kind. "A superior employee all around, you would say, then."

Yes, she was. If she kept up like this, he would have to seriously think about making her a shift supervisor.

"As she is my protege, so to speak, I would like to see her in action close up. Do you think you can send her by to wait on me and my associates in a couple of hours-a midnight supper for five?"

Of course he would arrange that. Excusing himself, the manager left.

"Five for supper, Sebastian?" Emma asked.

"You, me, Riptide, Jenny Song herself-and Azazel." Shaw said.

"Going to throw Azazel at her right away and see what she does?"

"Sink or swim. And I am_ most_ interested in finding out how she learned my name..."

* * *

><p>AN: Don't worry, Joon-Yi's POV will be back soon, but this scene worked best in third person with Sebastian and Emma.


	9. Dancing Bears And Other Curiosities

'The marvel was not how well the bear danced, it was that the bear danced at all.' –Russian Proverb.

* * *

><p>It's taken nearly two months until Sebastian Shaw deigned to visit his branch in Las Vegas, but finally tonight he did. Last night now, if I want to be technical. As when I was imprisoned, I will write an account of this, just in case, yet with little hope that if something does happen, anyone will find it. Let me make it more plain. I do not like Sebastian Shaw, nor Emma Frost, nor his cohorts, I do not trust them, and for all their talk about 'our own kind', I do not believe for a moment that he wouldn't vivisect me, were he to gain by it. Here it is, then—the tale of this first encounter.<p>

Working at the Hellfire Club, constant sexual harassment aside, isn't half as bad as working in the pharmacy during cold and flu season, and involves much less vomit. (Carefirst always hires an extra janitor for December through February.) Given that being a pharmacist requires a PhD and waitressing/hostessing does not, working there is actually quite easy in comparison. I mean, if you screw up a drinks order, the worst that happens is that someone gets miffed. If you screw up a prescription, someone may die of it. I admit I am not crazy about all the ass grabbing, but I can put up with it when all they're doing is copping a feel. Pinching I do not put up with.

I stopped the breast honking by putting a few artfully angled straight pins in the push-up pads in my bras. It only takes a few times for even the dimmest man to learn he's going to get a handful of 'Ouch!' rather than a handful of tit. An expression of surprise and an ingenuous "Is _that_ where that pin went?" always gets a laugh from the onlookers. And I am cleaning up on the money. There is plenty of exploitation going on here, only in my case, I am exploiting them quite mercilessly.

But not all the women working here have my particular advantages, and when Andi stumbled out of Private Booth Two with the makings of a black eye and a swelling lip, I was reminded of that. Hooking was legal in Nevada, but not in Las Vegas; Andi was one of the 'entertainers' the Club hired to get around the laws. Holding her face, she stumbled and fell; some of the members jeered. I got her up and into the ladies' lounge, directed the attendant to fetch an ice pack and aspirin.

"I know it's not a lot, but I _will_ put a twenty dollar surcharge on his tab and make sure it gets into your pay packet." I said. That was the most I could add without authorization from the shift supervisor, and twenty dollars back then was more like two or three hundred dollars of 2013 money. "I don't suppose that talking about pressing charges will do anything but make you laugh." Considering the prominence of the man who had hit her and thrown her out of the booth, it was so painful that laughing was the only release. This was 1961, and she was a sex worker. By the unwritten laws of the land of that day and age, she was fair game for any abuse up to the point of actual murder, and if she was murdered, no one would look very hard for her killer.

She did laugh. "Thr's a lot of desr't round Vegas," she slurred, holding her mouth. "Sand—d'gs real easy, for gr'ves. Ah!" The lounge attendant came back with ice, a towel, and the painkillers I'd asked for.

"Take these with water, not liquor, unless you want to wind up with big bleeding holes in your stomach," I instructed her. "I can't stay with you, they'll want me out front, but Mabel's here. Take it easy for a while, and I'll see about a cab for you."

"Th'ks, Jenny. Y'r alri'gt, n'mtter wha they say," she said, as I left the room.

Yeah, getting promoted so fast, over the heads of women who had worked there for years in some cases, hadn't won me many friends. But no one could say I wasn't capable or that I didn't work hard. The name 'Jenny' came from a misunderstanding over what I wanted on the ID I had purchased, probably for too much money, from a creature of the criminal underworld here in Vegas, and I didn't have to money then to change it.

No matter; Jenny's a simpler, more traditionally American name and helps offset my other strangenesses. I do feel odd about shedding the name 'Kaplan', disloyal to those who loved me, but my feelings for them are like fruit preserved whole in honey—suspended and crystallized. My father Joe Kaplan is just entering college, my mother Rosellen a skinny twelve year old with scabs on her knees, my sisters and brothers years from even being embryos.

I made the rounds once—at that time of night, most members who are going to arrive have already done so, but I check on them to be sure they're having a good time, pass on the name of a horse or some other bit of negotiable information, collect some money. Getting back to Andi, I walked her out the side door, and that was when the general manager, Mr. Robilotti found me.

"Jenny, Mr. Shaw is here tonight, and he's specifically asked for you to wait on him and his friends at a midnight supper."

"Aww, no, Paulie. Don't do that to the kid. Shaw and his friends, they look at you like you're something they'd wipe off their shoe," Anid said. "The Ice Queen's the worse, she looks at ya like she can read the label on your panties." The ice and aspirin had helped.

"It's all right, Andi," I told her. "Here, if that bruising isn't better by tomorrow night, go to a veterinary supply store, and ask for this salve." I scribbled a line on a blank receipt. "Trainers use it on race horses to relieve bruising and swelling. It'll fix you right up." (No, it hadn't been approved for use on humans, but horses are much more delicate creatures than people think and anything someone would use on a very, very expensive race horse's skin is usually fine for humans. A pharmacy secret.)

"Thank you—you got a good heart, Jenny. Be careful tonight, you hear?" She got in the taxi. Mr. Robilotti and I were left looking at each other in the richly fragrant (not in a good way) alleyway.

"Go to the roped-off booth, the first one on the right," he instructed me. "Close the curtains behind you and turn the lighting fixture on the table. There's a private suite back there."

"I was wondering why there was so much less space on the concourse floor than the other levels," I observed. "I will do that."

"Good girl. Don't worry—he did send you here, and I told him what a good job you've been doing." So Shaw knew about my fiction? The only way to deal was to throw myself on his mercy, then. Or seem to, while staying in control of the situation.

"Thank you, sir. "It was about ten-fifteen then, so I went back to hostessing for another hour and a half before I used the mysterious secret entrance, and I have to admit it was pretty cool. One moment I was in a decadent and hip nightclub, the next, in a private office, quiet except for music coming from the next room, Edith Piaf singing about the sadness of life and love in a throbbing, passionate voice. "Is that you, Miss Song? Come on in here and join the party."

I crossed the room and paused in the doorway. First of all, I saw the couple, she blond and blue-eyed and almost as beautiful as Raven Darkholme, he bronzed and beaming with a loose Ascot knotted at his neck. My first thought was: Sleazy. Sleazy. Sleazy. Porn movie producer sleazy. And that while she was beautiful now, there was something wrong, something cruel about her mouth, something that in ten years time would take over her whole face. Another man, with hair much longer than was fashionable even among the most avant-garde lurked around to one side, while a third man frowned at a glass of something that looked like water but almost certainly wasn't. Seeing him made me very happy because he had bright red skin and certain demonic features like pointed ears and a long, prehensile red tail. It was the first evidence I had that Shaw really was involved with mutants.

All of that I took in, in an eye-blink. Then a warm sentiment crept over me. Why, this handsome, charming couple wasn't sleazy at all. They were lovely people, quite the nicest I had ever met, and I liked them very much. These thoughts were so foreign to my nature, and they jarred so against my normal judgment, that they had to be something imposed on me from an outside source. Andi had mentioned that 'the Ice Queen' looked as if she knew what underwear you were wearing—was she the one messing with my head? I shoved that thought under, reminding myself '_it's not a lie if you believe it,_' and spoke before anyone else could.

"Good evening, Mr. Shaw," I made eye-contact with the man in the Ascot. "You know, of course, that I used your name and lied to Mr. Robilotti to get a job here. For that I apologize, and hope you will forgive me. You see, it was the only way I could think of to get into contact with other mutants."

"How could I fail to be moved by such a well-spoken and heartfelt apology?" he asked rhetorically and after an exchange of glances with the Ice Queen. "Especially when it comes from _such_ a sweet young girl. But you have the advantage of me—."

"Oh, I doubt that, sir."

He smiled. "Obviously you know who I am, whereas all I know of you is your name and that you're an excellent employee! First, though, let me introduce my associate, Emma Frost." (What a good name for her.) She inclined her head slightly, acknowledging the introduction. "The long-haired young man over there is Janos Quested, but we call him Riptide, don't we? And that moody fellow there is Azazel. Isn't his make-up grand?"

"Ah," I said, approaching them. "You're testing me. That's not make-up, it's his natural coloration and his natural features. All make-up has some scent, even the fragrance-free kind. For example, Miss Frost wears Coty Air-spun Powder, just like I do, and theatrical make-up smells even stronger than the kind women normally use. He would smell so strongly of grease-paint the whole room would stink of it, if it were make-up."

Azazel muttered something surprised –sounding in a Slavic language and knocked back the rest of his vodka.

"His appearance doesn't bother you?" Shaw asked.

"No, not particularly. Should it? I might add that up until recently, I've been institutionalized and on some very heavy psychopharmaceuticals, so I may well be clinically insane or else delusional from withdrawal. That's not a reflection on you or your character, sir," I said to Azazel. "just a statement of fact."

"She's not lying," Miss Frost commented. Yes, she had to be a mind reader of some kind. Indeed, I was being quite careful not to lie.

"You are starting to really intrigue me, Miss Jenny Song," Shaw said, regarding me closely. "Why don't you fix us some pre-dinner cocktails, so we can all be in the proper frame of mind when you tell us about how you learned my name or about the mutants around me? I fancy a touch of the Green Fairy, don't you?" He was asserting his control over the situation, not to mention me.

The Green Fairy, huh? Well, I saw Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge along with everyone else. "With pleasure," I smiled. "Just point me to the absinthe, the spoons, and the sugar cubes. When will the fifth member of the party be joining you?"

"She already has," Shaw said, looking at me. I think he expected me to be ignorant as to what the Green Fairy was, let alone how to prepare it. "Riptide, show her the wet bar, will you?"

Riptide did, leaning a little too close and staring at me a little too long. He was a nice-looking guy, but he had a less than pleasant body odor.

I gave him the smile I save for special occasions, the one which says I would cheerful saw off someone's foot with piano wire, if I took a fancy to, laughing with girlish glee while I sawed, and he backed down a little. The absinthe bottle was very crusty, and the label was in French. It said it had been bottled in 1855, which meant this was the real euphoric hallucinogenic deal.

Uh-oh. I probably shouldn't be drinking this stuff. Neither should they, but their habits were none of my business. Ah, there were the funny shaped glasses and fancy slotted spoons. Shot of Absinthe in the bottom of the glass, put the spoon over it and the cube in the spoon…

They were staring at me while I worked. I didn't like that. Didn't I get enough 'See the Dancing Bear' among humans as it was? Did I really need to take this from my supposed 'own kind' ? What was more, they were smirking. So to fill the empty air, I chatted amiably as I filled a pitcher with water and ice."If you have any mamushizake here, I could make Green Dragons instead."

"Mamushizake?" Emma Frost asked. "What is that?"

"It's the Japanese name for a rice-based liquor where you drown a poisonous viper in the raw spirit and bottle them together. They have to leave the snake in, that's how they can tell it's the genuine article." The Green Dragon cocktail was something I just made up, but not the liquor. Kind of beats a tequila worm all hollow, doesn't it?

"Really?" Shaw asked. "By the way, what is your mutant power?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," I turned and gave him a smile over my shoulder. "I was hoping you could tell me."

"You really don't know?" he persisted, this smarmy smile pasted on his face.

"Not at all." I said.

"Perhaps you should pay better attention to what you're doing," he suggested. "Because you're missing more than you know."

I looked down at a pitcher of ice water that was floating in mid air, and I did not have my prosthetics on. "What? No, it has to be a trick!"

TBC…..


	10. Absinthe And Deception

"Does it feel like a trick?" Shaw asked in return, smiling widely and spreading his arms in a gesture of openness.

I set the pitcher down on the bar carefully. It did not feel any different than if I had been wearing my prostheses. I can't feel with them, not as if they were part of my body, but as I've often told people, if you hold the non-eraser end of a pencil between your teeth and scratch the eraser end, you will feel _something, _thanks to conduction. That was how I sensed with my hooks, and I had felt the weight of the jug.

"It doesn't," I said, "but that doesn't mean it isn't. Any of you could have powers—one of you must have powers, if only to fool me. I never noticed you take my arms off. Maybe I'm still wearing them, and you're fooling me still." I tried to push down on the counter as if I were wearing everything as normal, and nearly fell. Yet I felt…something. Not pain, but a tingling.

"Take it easy! I swear, it's like watching a new-born foal take her first steps." Shaw smiled paternally. "Yes, Emma here did pull the wool over your eyes when you first came in. Psychically, that is. Azazel there divested you of those pointless things-," he gestured toward a corner of the sectional, where my prosthetics rested like unstrung puppet limbs. "while Emma kept you from noticing they were gone. And ever since, we've been watching you be—your true self, your potential realized."

"How did you know?" I reached for the bowl of sugar cubes, just as if I were using my hooks, and took out a lump. It hung in the air, light glinting on the tiny crystals.

"By observing you through the glass. Emma saw that you have a very strong energy field around you, strong but not radiating out more than an inch or two from your skin. Invisible to the naked eye, of course. She also saw that it followed the contours, not of your prostheses but of your hands, the hands you should have had. Try cupping that cube in the palm of your hand, yes, like that. Good girl…" So patronizing. "A very good beginning. Now—how about those drinks?"

Just like that, huh? Two seconds and then back to being his servant. "Just let me put my prostheses back on and they'll be ready." Fetching them, I put them back on. I felt naked without them, and these were people I did not want to be naked around.

"You're going to go back to using those things, when you don't have to?" Ms. Frosty Knickers asked.

"I've gone without them for less than a quarter of an hour," I pointed out. "Now is not the time to experiment—after all, I wouldn't want to wind up delivering the drinks into someone's lap by mistake. How much water do you take?" I poured the icy water over the cubes for each glass in turn and watched the sugar water mingle with the absinthe below. The sour olivine-color liquor bloomed pale, pale green, like the flash of a firefly, or the first flush of color on a weeping willow in spring. It_ was_ beautiful, but it was dangerous.

Everybody else's glass had a normal amount, four ounces all told with the water. Mine was a scant thimbleful. "That's all you're having?" Shaw asked. "That's not right. We're celebrating your joining us, after all."

"Consider my size," I countered, wetting my lips with the fluid-the alcohol version of not inhaling. I don't drink, other than a single glass of wine at family gatherings, because you can't drink while on paroxetine, and also because I don't want to be intoxicated around people I don't trust, _ever_. "A single for you is a triple for me, and I'm not only your guest, I'm serving. That's a lovely Courreges Miss Frost has on, and it would be a shame to spoil it with beurre blanc sauce." I was referring to her mini-dress, which was pure white with big silver grommets down the front from the high neckline to the hem.

"Thank you," she replied, smiling.

"But now that we're all provided with drinks, it's time for you to tell us your tale." Shaw sipped at his absinthe, focusing his eyes on my face.

"I shall have to start with the fifty-cent tour of my life," I began, "I was born in what is now South Korea to a mother who abandoned me within hours. I hold no rancor toward her; simply being born female counts as a deformity there. A girl with no arms and hands, well... I tell people I lost my limbs in an accident because bilateral limb-deficient phocomelia is a mouthful and takes more explaining than I care to do-it's not my job to educate the public. Besides, they can understand accidents better than they can understand congenital birth defects, which place one in the depths of the Uncanny Valley."

"Uncanny Valley," Permafrost laughed like ice tinkling in a drink. "_Where_ is_ that_?"

"It's not a place, it's a concept," I explained. And unless I was much mistaken, it was a concept that hadn't been conceived yet. "A Japanese toy designer (he was actually a robot designer, but right now robots were still the stuff of science fiction.) was analyzing market research when he noticed a trend so clear and so frequently repeated that it could be mapped out on a line graph. The more anthropomorphic-that is, the more human-like he made his toys, the better people liked them-up to a point where they became a little too human while not being quite human enough. Then the upward trend suddenly became a deep valley, the Uncanny Valley. Deformity is on the downward slope of that valley, while the reanimated corpse-zombies, Frankenstein's Monster, and such-is at the nadir. Artificial hands are on the upward side, getting back to the likeable again, up to the fully human and then the more human than human, like angels."

"Like this?" Miss Frosty Knickers asked, and changed into a living diamond. Only her eyes remained the same, sapphire with onyx centers, and seeing her blink was disconcerting.

"I'm not sure where to situate you on the graph," I told her, because I wasn't. She was eerie and beautiful both. "But in this form, you're a Valley Girl too." A joke that was utterly lost on them, alas.

"Uncanny," Shaw turned the word over in his mouth. "It sounds as though this concept is connected to Freud and his essay on the 'Unheimlich'."

"I would say so," I wet my lips again. "But then everything to do with the psychological, whether in refutation or in support of his theories, connects up to Freud."

Shaw was a great one for laughing. "Jenny Song, you talk like a PhD sometimes."

"And with good reason. I am one."

That galvanized Shaw. One moment he was the epitome of decadent relaxation, a drink in one hand and his other fondling Miss Frost's thigh, to not just bolt upright but leaning forward almost double, fixed on me. "What field?" he barked.

"Pharmacology." I replied. "My Bachelor's was in biochemistry. And yes, I know I'm a woman and I'm Asian and everything else, but somehow no one ever tried to tell me that my tiny little brain couldn't possibly absorb enough knowledge or all my education would go to waste because I'd just get married and have children, either."

He looked to Emma Frost. "She is very intelligent," she assessed me. "And even though she says she doubts her sanity, she believes it, and she's smart enough for it to be credible." She might be able to tell when/if I was telling the truth and cloud my perceptions, but she couldn't possibly read my mind fully, because some of the things I was thinking would have got me in some trouble with them.

I can be inept at reading people, but…I was getting the impression that he didn't like that I had an advanced degree. Why not? Because I was a woman, and it upset his worldview? Because he preferred that his people be nothing but flunkies (like Azazel and Riptide obviously were) or femmebots? (no comment) Or something else? PhDs, by the way, can be as gullible and easily led as anyone else. I know of one who actually believed the Nigerian e-mail fraud and lost his life's savings.

"So—a PhD. And what did you do with your degree, Miss Song?" he asked.

"That's getting ahead of my story," I sat back, wet my lips with my drink again. "To recap, born in South Korea, abandoned at birth, etcetera, For lack of anything else to do with me, I was placed in an orphanage once I was ready to leave the hospital. An American couple responded to an appeal for help for the poor orphans, and adopted me. I was brought up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. School was fairly easy for me academically, despite being good at unfeminine subjects like math and science, but not so easy socially. After—after something very bad happened to me when I was thirteen, I was put on anti-anxiety medication, which I believe also suppressed my powers. I took it up until a couple of months ago."

"Thorazine?" Shaw asked.

"What else is there? Thalidomide wasn't available then, and anyhow, it's since been withdrawn from the market," I replied. I was not lying; there wasn't much else available in the way of psychopharmaceuticals in 1961. "Despite my emotional problems, I thrived in college, and went on to pharmaceutical college. After I received my doctoral degree, I got my license and subsequently, a job as an assistant pharmacist and was promoted to full pharmacist a year later."

"Just a pharmacist?" Shaw insinuated. "With so much ability, your ambitions reached no higher than becoming a pill-counter?"

"As opposed to the splendid self-actualization offered by becoming a hostess in a private club?" I countered. "I'm not DaVinci, and there's more to being an effective pharmacist than just counting pills. If you don't agree, I hope you never wind up going to an incompetent or unethical pharmacist."

"No, no!" he protested, his tanned face splitting open in a toothy white smile. "You misuderstand. I was speaking facetiously. I consider that an exceptional achievement. But it does beg the question of what you're doing here." An example of how bad I can be at reading people, or back and fill on his part?

"Which brings me to the plot twist in my tale." Another lip-wetting of absinthe. "'Jennifer Song' is not my real name. I can't use my real name, so I can't work in my field. No references and no proof of my identity, you see. This is where you come in, tangentially. You see, outside of work, my favorite pastimes are reading and chess. Reading is a solitary activity, but for chess you need a partner. One day, about a year and a half ago, I went to the park looking for a match, but when I got there, the only empty place was across from a very old gentleman. His name was Magnus Magnussen, or so he claimed..." What I wove from air and a few gauzy truths was a fantastic web of mystery, because of course I could not come anywhere near the full truth.

TBC, again.


	11. Metrics

"I suspected right away that he was not born or raised in America," I continued. "He had a slight accent, German, I thought, and when he ate with a knife and fork, he wasn't always swapping them back and forth, as Americans do. Yet I never imagined—when one thinks of illegal immigrants hiding under false names, usually it's of someone Hispanic from Mexico and parts south of there. Not kindly grandfathers who speak perfect English and play killer chess. He was very gentlemanly. Flirtatious in a gallant way, like it was a reflex and not an expression of real interest—he was well over eighty and nearly ninety. Our relationship was platonic."

Again, I wet my lips with the drink. It smelled like licorice, and I have never really liked licorice. Across from me, Shaw shifted impatiently. I went on. "At the beginning, all we did was play chess. He beat me every time, and I'm a pretty good player. Then we started going out for coffee or tea after the match, and we'd talk. He was educated. Cultured. He knew about art and literature, about social issues. We didn't have much in common where music was concerned, so we never really got into that, not after a nasty argument over Madame Butterfly. But while he encouraged me to talk about myself, he never shared much about his own life."

Thinking about him started getting me worked up again. I let it. There is nothing like getting weepy and falling apart (in moderation) for being convincing. "For over a year, we played a game of chess almost every week. I—I never had a grandfather, you see, so I suppose he filled a void. Over a year—and then the holidays came around again. When we exchanged gifts—I gave him a hat and a scarf, he gave me a tin of fancy tea—I saw he wasn't looking well. He said he thought he was coming down with a cold. I missed a couple of games, thanks to all the family stuff I had going on, and then he missed a couple—he said his cold was planning to spend the winter—so it was early February before I saw him again. Then I knew he was very sick. But he said he was just getting over his cold, and I—chose to believe him. Not believing him would have stepped over a line, you see. He was entitled to his privacy and his dignity.

"The next time I called him, he didn't answer his phone. Not the first time, or the third, or the sixth. So I went over to his apartment—I brought him chicken soup and groceries, on occasion—and when I knocked, he didn't answer the door. By then I knew, even though I wasn't admitting it to myself. I called Emergency, and they sent over an ambulance. He was lying on the floor in his kitchen, and he'd been dead for a while. They took the body away to the morgue, and I was left to sort through his things –he wasn't well-to-do, so they just let me look around to see if I could find an address book or something to contact his next-of-kin.

"Many old people let things pile up, and he was one of them. While I searched, I thought about what he had told me of his life, his family. He'd said he was a widower, that he and his children and grandchildren weren't on speaking terms, and his oldest friend was dead. I was the only person who missed him enough to do anything before the body started to smell. What was the likelihood that even if I found contact information, that the person would care?" My audience was starting to get restless in general. Time to amp it up.

"Then—I guess you're familiar with Kafka's The Trial, where the protagonist gets arrested and prosecuted yet never finds out why or by whom or for what? The trial is meaningless nonsense, and he leads this life of increasing paranoia until he turns thirty and they kill him? It was like that. There were police downstairs, and they asked me to come down and make a statement. I went, like the good little citizen I was, only when I got down there, someone gave me a knock-out injection. They weren't police. They were federal agents.

"It turns out my friend Mr. Magnussen was a criminal, someone wanted so badly and for something so horrible that just for being close to him, I had to be made to vanish away. While I was unconscious, they evacuated and condemned the building on the grounds there had been a toxic chemical leak. Mr. Magnussen really had been experimenting with some dangerous substances, it seems, but they used that as an excuse to stage a scene in the morgue to convince my family I had died on the scene. They couldn't get close enough to tell I was only drugged because they were told the chemicals were too hazardous.

"When I woke up, I was in that institution I told you about. I wasn't mistreated while I was there. I was never raped or tortured or starved. Yet it didn't feel like they were being merciful or humane, it felt as though… all the bad things could start at any moment. Why shouldn't they? No one knew where I was. It was an intolerable misery. So… I waited, and eventually I found a way to escape that would leave them thinking I was dead." I do know how to tell a story. They were utterly silent.

When Frostbite rustled her dress, I continued. "Mr. Magnussen once mentioned Sebastian Shaw, who owned the Hellfire Club in Las Vegas. It came up in the context of a discussion of the mutant question. It was only a casual reference, made in passing, but I remembered. He said you were the first man when it came to mutant issues, something to that effect, because you were a mutant yourself. I remembered, and when I found myself free, but alone and friendless, it was here that I came, to turn to you. When I found out you weren't here—well, I was rather upset. Desperate, in fact, and so I made up a lie to get a job, so I could stay and wait for you. Also, I needed the work, I needed money. And so I worked, and waited. Today you came."

The eyes I turned to him were shiny with tears. "I can't go home, or even contact my family to let them know I'm alive. I have no other resources, no one in the world."

He pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. "There, now. It's all right. You're among your own kind. Wipe your face and finish your drink. Emma?"

"Everything she said is the truth, but there's something smoky about all of it. She's holding out."

I sobbed once into the white cotton. "O—of course I haven't told you everything! That would take all night and anyhow I've only just met you! W—would you tell strangers _everything_?"

"It's all right," Shaw said soothingly. "Can you answer a few questions for me?"

"I—I think so."

"This Magnussen—did you ever get his real name?"

"Not from him, and like I said, this was a lot like The Trial. There was a lot the Feds didn't tell me." There—a decent bit of misdirection. I never said I didn't know his real name.

"But he was an old man, you said. What did he look like?" Shaw asked.

"Old. Wrinkled, liver-spotted. He had silver hair and blue eyes. Just…ordinary."

"Just an ordinary old man. Magnussen. Magnus…" He mused aloud. "Jenny—what does the name 'Erik' mean to you?"

"The Phantom of The Opera," I said automatically, because it was perfectly true. "That was the phantom's name. 'Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be "some one," like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius…when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind!' I was in love with him all through high school. I carried that book around with me for months."

Shaw laughed, of course. He was a great one for laughing. "Now _there's_ a mutant for you. 'Poor, unhappy Erik!' Hmm…Did Magnussen ever mention a Doctor Klaus Schmidt?"

"No. Never."

"Hmm. You're posing me quite a thorny problem. The thing is, I know of several people who could have been your Magnussen, but either they're the wrong age or they have the wrong color eyes or I know where they are and it's not dead or in America. Well, I have certain sources of information I can call on, and maybe they can shed some light on this. Now I want some dinner. Riptide, call down to the kitchen and tell them I'll have the prime rib with truffle sauce. What does everybody else want?"

Evidently possession of a PhD bumps me up above Riptide in Shaw's estimation.

I watched a few episodes of the show Mad Men, to see what it was about, and although I never really got into it, I did come away with certain impressions about the early 60s. Everybody smoked, everybody drank, everybody screwed around, and they did a lot of all three. At least the drinking part seemed to be true. The wine flowed freely at dinner that evening (I stuck to ginger ale. Why is there no sophisticated adult alternative to alcohol?) and then there were after-dinner drinks. Neither Riptide nor Azazel said a whole lot, and most of the conversation doesn't demand to be immortalized in this journal.

However, I may have made a huge error. I admit a lot of my self-esteem is bound up in how intelligent I am, and perhaps it borders on excess and topples over into pride. I was doing pretty well for myself in the conversation, and in response to something I said, Shaw asked "Have you ever taken an IQ test, Jenny?"

"Yes, I have. Several times."

"And the results?" he asked.

"IQ alone isn't a measure of how successful a person will be. I've known people who tested in the genius range in grade school who nearly twenty years later were still living in their parents' basement, working part time in retail and playing—board games all the rest of the time." I nearly said _video_ games, which would not do at all.

"How high did you score?" he persisted.

I don't think I should have given the answer I did. "Twice my bust measurement in centimeters minus my shoe size."

He frowned. "Stand up and walk over here for a moment. Turn around."

Although he hadn't said 'please', I did it anyway. Looking me up and down, he said. "One hundred and sixty-five. Very impressive."

"Unlike her bust measurement itself," Frosty the Snowgirl sniped.

"Meeeow!" I replied. Her remark deserved no more dignified a response. "No, it's more like a hundred and sixty-two. This bra exaggerates things. I'm impressed—the metric stumps almost everybody." Again, I had the sense he wasn't pleased, and I don't think it's because I'm smarter than he is. I have the sense we're about in the same weight class, so to speak.

But the part which really set me on edge came later, at about two in the morning. At that point, I was the only stone cold sober person in the room, with Frostbite about halfway between the state of sober and drunk. There's something humiliating about being the only non-drinker at the party, and I was smarting like a case of heartburn. I don't know why, I should be used to it by now.

Shaw tossed back a brandy, focused his eyes on me, and said "Since your mutation compensates for your missing hants" a German accent had slipped into his voice "—would it not be interestink to see if it were to compensate for other parts ov your anatomy as they are lost?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, suddenly very glad to be sober.

"Your eyes, for instance. What might you see wizout flesh-und-blood eyes? Or your earz, or your tongue, perhapz. What perzeptions lie in your powers of which you are unaware? Do you not wish to know?"

"Sebastian, darling, you've had a bit too much," Permafrost chided him.

"Only az a matter of zcientific curiosity," he protested.

"No," I said, very quietly, because I was slightly queasy. He couldn't mean—could he? Yes. He could. He did. "That's not something I want to know. What I do want to know is, what happens now that I've joined you?"

"What happens now?" he asked, sitting up straighter. The accent faded as he pulled himself together. "Ah. Yes. For now, you need practice. Practice and develop your powers until you reach your absolute limit. I also want you to keep on doing what you're doing now, only I'll want you to pay special attention to certain guests and members. Once I'm satisfied that you've cultivated your powers to the utmost, then we'll see. I also want you to keep up in what's going on in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals. How does a thousand dollars a month to cover your expanded responsibilities sound?"

"It sounds fine. Would that be before or after taxes?" I asked, glad to get the conversation back to something more mundane.

"Oh, Uncle Sam's not going to get wind of this. It's off the books."

"Very well. Then since I work tomorrow, I will thank you for extending the protection of your organization to me, and for a lovely evening. Good night."

And so I left and came home.

Upon reading over what I've written and considering it with care, I've come to three conclusions.

Conclusion the First: Shaw and Schmidt are almost certainly one and the same. Support for this?

Shaw slips into German when in his cups; Klaus Schmidt is a German name.

Conclusion the Second: Shaw/Schmidt knows who Erik/Magneto/Magnussen is, and he knows him personally. Support for this?

Shaw asked me about 'Erik'. (How on earth did a German-born Jew wind up with such a Scandinavian spelling, anyhow? Shouldn't he be 'Erich' instead?)

Conclusion the Third: I need to be damned careful, because Shaw might decide to do some exploratory surgery on me. Unsupported. Gut feeling, that's all.

Speculation: Shaw should by all rights have been at the Nuremberg Trials along with the other major Nazi war criminals. Why? Put a certain sort of unethical scientific curiosity together with a German accent, add his acquaintance with a Holocaust Survivor, and 'What did you do during the War, Daddy?'

But that is enough for one night. Time to get some sleep.

* * *

><p>Back at the Hellfire Club:<p>

"What did you think of her, my sweet Emma?" Shaw asked as his companion slipped the band from her hair in preparation for bed, if not for sleep.

"She could almost be a Negro, with that flat nose and those thick lips. I'm sure I've seen Negros with skin as light as hers."

"She is not a Negro, and you're clinging to the mores of an outmoded societal standard. We are above that now. All that matters are her genes and her powers. Besides, she has a very well-shaped mouth. Leaving your irrational jealousy aside, what was your assessment of her?"

"She's not like your other recruits. She's not angry enough at the world or at humans. That might just be her temperament—her mind rules over her emotions. Probably always has and always will—."

"Could she be a plant, a double agent?" he asked.

Emma paused while reaching for the zipper at the back of her neck. "Whose?"

"China. North Korea."

"You should have asked me before. Help me with this?" She nodded him over.

"With the greatest pleasure." The zipper purred down in his hand. "She told no actual lies, did she?"

"No. But I wouldn't trust her. Not yet. Her story has as many holes as a pair of fishnet stockings. You slipped up, though. Darling…" He kissed the back of her neck.

"How did I do that?" He nibbled further.

"Dr. Schmidt was showing. And she noticed. Mmmmm." Emma moaned.

"Ah, she may have noticed, but she won't understand…" After that, they were a little too busy for conversation.


	12. Taking A Break To Go Shopping

So what with work and training, it's been a while since I last updated. Over a month, in fact.

Shaw departed, entourage in tow, four days after he came, leaving me with woefully little advice on how I was to train and develop my powers. I've had to work it out for myself, and I don't know if I'm doing it right or if there's some easier way, but it's all I've got.

Properly speaking, I'm not a telekinetic. Telekinetics move things with the power of their minds, without touching them. I move things with an energy field that happens to work like a pair of hands. I have to visualize my hands doing what I want them to do, and at first it was hard not to see them as the hooks on my prostheses, and impossible to do anything beyond arms' length or to lift anything heavier than I can lift without powers. Last night, however-well, let me back up a little.

What with one thing and another, my salary, tips from the club, my own careful off-track betting, and now Shaw's stipend, I realized the other week that I had eleven thousand dollars in the bank. Therefore, I went off to buy myself a car. Most cars of that era were still huge, like on-board motorboats that jumped the pier and ran wild on the roads, and I couldn't even imagine driving one. They had solid steel construction and no power steering or brakes. It would be a wrestling match every time!

But a few car companies were coming out with something more compact and sporty. I decided on a nice little 1962 Rambler two door in turquoise with a white roof and a white stripe down the sides, an automatic transmission _and _with _seat belts! _It wasn't too expensive and it wasn't too heavy. It was two thousand five hundred dollars when all was said and done, and I paid cash. I love it! It has so much more style than the cars of the Millennium, it really does. And it goes up to a hundred and twenty. There are plenty of lonely roads in Nevada and _no radar guns_.

Unfortunately, while my apartment comes with a parking space, it also comes with an obnoxious downstairs neighbor who insists on parking so I can't get in at night, and glowers when I ask him, politely, to move. Last night, I had had enough.

I moved it for him. While sitting in the comfort of my own car, I popped his clutch, put it in neutral, and moved it some ten or twelve feet uphill right in front of the fireplug, where I put the clutch back on, put it back in park, and even threw the emergency brake, just in case. Not a soul saw me do it—I get in quite late, after all.

This morning, he had a ticket. Oh, was he ticked off! I kept the straightest possible face when he came and knocked on my door. Before he could ask me anything, I thanked him warmly for being so considerate the night before, and that I knew I was being a bother rousting him out night after night, but I was so glad we had now worked out our difficulties. All nice and loud and clear so the other neighbors could hear.

The upshot of it all is (other than that I don't think he'll be parking like a pig wallowing in two pens at once anymore) that I have never moved anything so heavy, at such a distance and requiring such precision before. So to celebrate, today I went clothes shopping. Right now I am sitting in clouds of tissue paper, with billows of new clothes all around me on the bed. That three piece tangerine silk cocktail outfit, the apple green boucle miniskirt suit—it's fun just being a girl for once.

But the day didn't start out on a good note. At the first boutique I went to, 'Petite Lady'-well, I saw the smiles freeze up on the salesladies' lips and heard the 'Welcomes' trail off, and I knew they would like nothing better than if a hole were to open in the floor and swallow me up. My inner dragon would not let me turn around and go, however. Why should I be meek, acquiescent, and humble? So what if I am Asian, and…differently abled? (A phrase which has never fit me better than now.) I have a goddamned PhD, mutant powers, and I need cater to nobody.

So I browsed among the racks, listening carefully to the murmurs and whispers, waiting. And sure enough, the senior saleslady came over to say, "EXCUSE…ME." Very loudly and slowly, because even foreigners can understand English if you just speak loudly and slowly enough.

"Oh, it's quite all right. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with my hearing," I said, brightly and in a friendly way. "I was wondering if you had this in a size zero." I held up one of the blouses I was comparing.

"I'm afraid not." _She had better hope the expression on her face didn't freeze there_, I thought. "In fact, I'm very sorry, but I don't think we have anything that would be suitable for you."

"Really?" I said, still bright and friendly and perfectly polite. "What a shame. I do have to say, though, that your wares aren't nearly as attractive as they look from outside. I have only five hundred dollars to spend today and I have to choose carefully. Thank you so much for your time." I handed the blouses to her and headed straight for the door, where I paused. "In a place like this, don't you work on commission? Good day."

Yeah, so I cribbed that last line from Pretty Woman, more or less. It was worth it.

Across the street, there was a department store, the Broadway-Hale store. I went there. Did I ever go there! In addition to the aforementioned cocktail outfit and suit, I got a cashmere-camelhair blend coat in cherry-red, and two hat-scarf sets, one black and white zebra striped and the other in leopard print, tops to go with the suit in violet, cerise, and black, several sets of lingerie, nightwear, and hosiery.

Then there's the dark red evening gown in rayon jersey, with that spangled black wrap like a swath ripped out of the night sky, and the gilded leather evening sandals, the go-go boots , one pair ankle length and the other calf-high, the gold hoop earrings, the black tassel earrings, the metal belt with gold and silver links, and a fabulous little watch in the shape of an owl, on a long chain so I can wear it around my neck. I also had a facial and topped the day off with afternoon tea in the store's chic little café, where they served me smoked salmon and cucumber sandwiches, scones, and tiny fruit tarts and éclairs.

And you know what? There's not a safe, dull color in the whole pile. (Black does not count.) Nor is there much in the way of white. Emma Frost has claimed that color; I shall claim all the rest. I am through with hiding, with blending in, with avoiding people's eyes. I want to be seen and noticed.

Anyhow, by the time I was done, the manager sent two stock boys out with me to carry all my packages. And you know what? My car was still parked a space up from 'Petite Lady'. I knocked on the glass as we went past.

The sour yet distressed look on that saleslady's face will live with me forever. I know, I know, it was petty and mean of me, but prejudice and discrimination are worse.


	13. Moira

A/N: Okay, from here on out this story starts to follow events in First Class, although in an alternative universe, and there may be spoilers. If you haven't seen it yet, it is now out on disc, so what are you waiting for?

* * *

><p>All the pieces are coming together, even though they don't realize it yet.<p>

In Switzerland, a man enters a bank carrying with him a bar of Nazi gold, which was originally Jewish gold. He believes he is Frankenstein's Monster, traveling to the ends of the earth in search of his creator, but that's because he hasn't read enough literature. If he'd read Alexandre Dumas, he would have recognized himself in Edmond Dantes, the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo. He is Erik. Poor, unhappy Erik.

In an apartment in San Francisco, a young woman with what looks like a tattoo of wings across her back and shoulders wakes up at four in the afternoon, shuffles to the kitchen on swollen feet encased in heavy orthopedic stockings. She's a stripper, has been for far too long, young as she is, and stripping is hard on the legs and feet. She pours herself a healthy measure of orange juice and adds an unhealthy belt of vodka, because stripping is also hard on the psyche. Angel is no Angel, not at all.

In Leavenworth, Kansas, a kid named Alex is thrown back in solitary confinement. He's glad of it, because he's only safe when he's encased in thick concrete. That's not because he's safe from others then, but that others are safe from him.

A young scientist hard at work in a secret CIA lab wishes he could take his shoes and socks off and stretch his feet. He's alone, and he could even lock the door, but he doesn't dare. He just doesn't dare. His name is Henry.

Across the Atlantic, a young woman is watching her brother by adoption try to chat up a girl in a bar. The girl in question is very pretty. Maybe her brother, who can read minds, has read the girl's and knows whether or not she's smart and funny and nice, but from where Raven is standing, all she can tell is that the girl is blond and shapely (as is Raven, at least at the moment). Charles isn't acting as if he wants to get to know her any way but carnally, though, and what that says to Raven is: Men only want one thing, even the best of them. And if you're a girl and you're not attractive, you're worthless.

It's a lesson she's had before.

There are others, of course, the cab driver in New York, the boy who screams, the telepath himself-who is very good at reading minds but lousy at reading hearts-and then there is the CIA agent who stripped to her underwear and snuck into the Hellfire Club.

* * *

><p>This time it's been even longer since I last updated. I know why. It's because I'm putting so much into being 'Jenny', and Jenny is not a very introspective person. She may be an aspect of me, but she is not me in my entirety. I am still Joon-Yi Kaplan, and that will not change, even though those who knew me then would not recognize quiet, shy Joon-Yi in the perky, sociable Jenny.<p>

One problem I face is that I am so alone here. I am attached to no one, am not loved, do not love. The human (by which I also mean mutant) heart wants, must have something to cherish or else you wind up with a house full of two hundred and fifty cats, not all of which are healthy or even alive. The other danger is that I might wind up becoming attached to Shaw and his people after all. Shaw has charisma, despite the sleaze. He is genuinely delighted with how my powers have developed, like a fond parent.

I've sought through every history and reference on WWII and the concentrations camps that the libraries have to offer, and have found no mention of 'Doctor Klaus Schmidt', beyond a mention here and there on personnel lists. He must have worked very hard indeed to so efface himself from history. Was his transformation into Sebastian Shaw like mine into Jenny Song, aspects already there in his personality, magnified and allowed to show? I don't want to have anything in common with him at all.

I've got to start hanging out with a better class of people. Well, on to the meat of the matter.

The good news is-I now know Shaw is going to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis, and how. Which is also the bad news. Whatever it is he has planned, he doesn't know that the outcome will amount to several weeks of increasing tension culminating in a couple of very edgy days, sound and fury signifying nothing. Except that all people will focus on afterward is that mutants were involved. Mutants brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Weird looking freaks who hate the whole world because they can't be normal.

But by then Shaw will be dead, having thrown us all into a hot mess that will only get hotter and messier over the next fifty years, until the Cure threatens all mutants with extinction. I don't know what he has planned, but surely that isn't it.

Or…is it?

Where are Shaw's (or Schmidt's, if you like) children? A man with such delusions of grandeur ought to have a house full of little ubermenschs and a superior-gened mother who pops them out on a regular basis. Despite their tender relations, I somehow don't see Emma as Frosty the Snowmom, but Shaw is old enough to have had prior relationships, even grown children.

Is Shaw sterile, an evolutionary dead-end?

Resentful of that, depressed by it, can he be trying to doom us all? Is his subconscious driving him to destroy a future he has no genetic stake in?

People do dumb-ass suicidal things all the time, even things that endanger or kill their loved ones, without knowing why. They smoke. They text while driving. They forget their babies in the car when they park in the sun on a hot day.

As intriguing as that theory is, I shall put it aside for the moment.

Colonel Hendry was first on the list of people I was to pay especial attention to. When we were introduced, and he learned I was Korean by birth, he flinched. Well, I was told he was a veteran of the Korean War, so I chalked it up to PTSD and didn't take it personally.

Then I read the file Shaw had on him. I am the product of a more cynical and disillusioned age. Fourteen when the Twin Towers fell, I spent most of the next decade losing faith in the inherent goodness of my country. How could I not? Abu Gharib. Guantanamo. Waterboarding. The photos of the man standing on a stool, his arms stretched out, wires connected to his hands, wearing a trash bag and a hood over his head. That woman soldier holding a naked man on a leash. Torture, degradation, and it was my country doing these things.

Good guys don't do things like that. It didn't seem as though there were any good guys anywhere anymore. Every day my country spent at war in the Middle East, it seemed as though we made more enemies than we killed.

With that history fresh in my mind, I can't say I was shocked by what I read about Hendry. Using civilian women and children as human shields, setting fire to villages, torture, yeah, I'd seen it all on the news. It certainly explained the look of horror on his face when he saw my prostheses.

I bet Shaw set me on Hendry deliberately to unnerve him. It's what I would have done.

Anyhow, tonight Hendry was to be wined and dined regally, starting with champagne and caviar toast points, and my job was to serve the canapés. So I went along to the kitchen, got the tray, and went into Shaw's office only to find a girl in her underwear going through his correspondence. At first I thought it was Andi, because from the back they looked alike. She was so intent she didn't even notice me until I was right on top of her, and then I saw she wasn't Andi after all.

* * *

><p>Moira started and stifled a gasp when the metal claw came down on the papers she was studying. <em>Oh, no<em>. Glancing up, her first thought was _Robotic Asian schoolgirl? _

Nothing good could possibly come of getting caught snooping around the secret office of Sebastian Shaw, not when there were documents in Russian all over the desk and she was literally pantsless.

Yet the robot, who was not a robot but a double amputee with prosthetic arms, and not technically a girl but a grown woman dressed in the schoolgirl's outfit of a dirty old man's most lascivious fantasies, had her other hook pressed to her lips in the universal gesture for silence. '_Go_', she mouthed at Moira, jerking her head toward the secret entrance. _'Go now'_.

The last thing Moira had expected to find in the bowels of the Hellfire Club was concern for her safety, but if she could read faces at all, that was what she saw on the other woman's visage. _'No,_' she mouthed back, and took a tremendous chance, '_CIA_'.

The Asian girl's eyes widened, her eyebrows climbing her forehead. _'They'll kill you_,' she mouthed, nodding toward the other door and accompanying it with a throat-slitting gesture made all the more sinister by the hooks.

Moira put her hand over her heart as though making the Pledge of Allegiance. '_Duty_.' she mouthed.

The Asian shrugged. _'Your funeral_,' as a voice from the inner room called out, "Jenny, is that you? Is something wrong with the canapés?"

"It is me, and nothing's wrong. I'm coming." Picking a tray of hors d'oeuvres, the young woman headed into the room, the door automatically opening and closing behind her. It didn't close all the way, however.

Encouraged, Moira drew nearer, stepping carefully to avoid whatever triggered the door. Peeking through the crack, she watched and listened to a man betray his country, his species, and the world.

TBC…


	14. Colonel Hendry

Well, I'd warned her, so Miss CIA 1962 was now on her own. She was not my problem. I had enough on my mind, and in fact, the best thing I could do for her was to put her as far from my mind as I could, because while Frostbite couldn't read most of what was going on in my head, she never stopped fishing. Sometimes she hooked something I would rather not share.

Such as what I knew about Colonel Hendry, for example. He would be reported missing in two weeks time, and go on to become one of the great unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century. No body would ever be found, no explanation ever uncovered. His last known whereabouts was somewhere in Florida. Frosty Knickers caught me thinking about the mystery surrounding him a couple of days ago, and I had to cover by saying it was a mystery to me why he hadn't been court-martialed and executed. She did not seem convinced.

Anyhow, picking up the tray, I went in and smiled brightly at everyone. It really was a stunning room; polished wood, oyster white walls, wood burning fire place, the furnishings somewhere fashionably between Art Deco and Mod. Here and there, flocked red velvet wallpaper provided a touch of the infernal, so vital to a clubroom at the Hellfire. Architectural Digest would have swooned to do a spread on it. Personally, I never liked rooms without windows to the outdoors, even before I wound up in Mutant Prison, and so I did not care for this one. But I wasn't here to offer my opinions on the décor.

"Toast points?" I offered them around. Had the Colonel been a patient at Carefirst who came up to the pharmacy window to fill a prescription for the first time, I would have said to myself,_ Hypertension, hyperlipidemia, at risk of heart attack or stroke_. Not that I'm a diagnostician, but after a while you just get so that you can predict what medications you'll be reaching for.

In other words, he looked as though he had high blood pressure, high cholesterol and the usual array of health problems that went with being a middle aged man with a ruddy complexion who wasn't in any too good shape. Add in that this was the sixties, so he probably smoked and habitually ate three eggs and three strips of bacon with toast and butter every morning…his cardiovascular system would be a grease trap. However, although I winced as he grazed his way through the tray of toast points topped with a spoonful of sour cream and a dollop of caviar (all that sodium and cholesterol...I could hear his arteries clanging shut while he ate), given what I knew, it was a little late for anyone, least of all he himself, to be concerned about his health.

Reaching out, I probed inside his chest with my energy field fingers, something I had learned to do recently. He shivered, made a joke about 'someone walking over my grave.' Otherwise, he did not feel a thing as I felt around in his aorta, which was, yes, lumpy inside.

At Shaw's suggestion that I keep Hendry company, I sat down to his left on the white leather sectional. Frostbite was on his right, about the same distance away from him as I. A king flanked by two enemy queens? No, if I was any piece on the board, I was a knight. They never move in straight lines and often come down where they're least expected.

Taking a piece of toast for myself, thus establishing I was part of the gathering and not just the server, I sat back and listened. The conversation began conventionally enough, but soon it turned. Were I Shaw, I would never have allowed a semi-outsider, namely me, to sit in on such a conference.

I can only suppose he wanted to make as great a show of strength as possible.

"Are you sure we can't get you another drink, Bob?" Shaw said, once the pleasantries were done. As he spoke, he put Edith Piaf on the record player once again. How civilized, how sophisticated!

"No, no, thanks," the Colonel refused.

"I hear you blocked that proposal to position Jupiter missiles in Turkey," said the club owner without further preamble. "I expect you'll reconsider." He sat down, stretching one arm out along the back of the sofa.

"We've had this conversation," Hendry stated, his tones flat. "You put our nukes in Turkey or anywhere that close to Russia, and you're looking at war. Nuclear war. I do enjoy your hospitality, I appreciate your generosity, but this is too big a favor to ask in return."

"I don't ask for favors, Colonel," Shaw retorted. "I express my expectations. So—let me say it again. I expect you'll reconsider." The words fell into the air like ice cubes into a glass.

"The only thing I will reconsider is having another glass of this delicious champagne," was Hendry's response. He reached for the bottle, while Shaw looked to Riptide and made a swirling gesture.

I had seen this before. Riptide created vortexes in air, water, even loose sand or dirt. Whirling up a miniature cyclone, he unleashed it in the Colonel's direction.

"What the hell did you put in my drink?" Hendry gawked. Then the vortex knocked him off his feet and against the back wall.

"Jenny, keep him down," Shaw ordered me, and I did, pressing him into the floor. Frosty Knickers strode over to stand above him, followed by Shaw and Riptide. I went along to see what was happening.

Just as she couldn't read me, I couldn't hear her, but from Hendry's reaction, she was telling him something he did not like. Threats, I was sure. I knew these people by now. His eyes darted from one of us to another, looking for some way out. Then she shifted into her diamond form, and I thought I heard a feminine gasp from behind the door. Oh, no, was the CIA agent still there?

"Magnificent, isn't she, Bob?" Shaw smarmed, running his fingertips over her shoulder. "Genetic mutation. The evolution of the human genome. Where's Azazel?" The last part was addressed to Frosty the Snowgirl, who put her lips together and gave a piercing shrill whistle.

Azazel appeared in a puff of malodorous red smoke. "Ah," Shaw said. "We don't want the Colonel to be late. Jenny, let him go now."

I did, and Azazel reached out his hand. "Comrade," he said. (Hendry's face contorted in disgust at the Russian accent and Communist form of that address.) A flash of fire, more smoke and they were gone.

Then it was a matter of waiting for the phone call which would tell Shaw the vote had gone through. I excused myself to 'powder my nose,' confirming that Miss CIA was gone in the process. When I returned it was to find Shaw beaming and pouring more champagne. I even accepted half a glass at his insistence.

"What a spineless worm," I said, taking a second piece of caviar toast and addressing my next words to Shaw. "If he were half the man he pretended to be, he'd have defied you and died for his country. But then you wouldn't have chosen him, would you?"

"You sound disappointed," he said, in mock sympathy. "Would you have preferred him to die for his country?"

"Given what was in his file, he ought to have done so already," I replied.

"Would you like to see to it that he does?" Shaw inquired, leaning down over the back of the sofa to speak confidingly, intimately, into my ear. "Not now, of course. Not before he's fulfilled his obligations. Once it's certain, once the silos are being built and filled with the seeds of-." There he paused.

"The seeds of what?" I asked.

"The seeds of the world to come," he finished. "Once he's of no use to us any longer. You see, as yet you haven't committed to us. Not in full. I have no proof of your loyalty, and I want a reason to trust you."

"If you're thinking of taking me to bed, I should warn you I'm asexual," I told him, stalling. It wasn't quite true, but it might as well have been. Among paroxetine's many, many adverse side effects is that it kills both sexual desire and performance in men and women alike. I had barely had any sexual feelings before I started taking it at age thirteen, and since going off it entirely, I had been working at the Hellfire Club, running the gamut of sexual harassment every night. That was even more effective at killing desire than the paroxetine, if such a thing were possible. I do know I like guys rather than girls, but I never met anyone who did anything for me. Not in real life, anyhow.

He laughed. "No, no, not that. I have nothing like that in mind. Can't you guess?"

"You mean for me to kill Colonel Hendry," I stated. "It would hardly be a challenge. His arteries are like someone poured bacon grease down a drain. All I'd have to do is reach in, scrape a little free from his aorta and let it go."

"If it looks like natural causes, so much the better," Shaw grinned a selachian grin at the edge of my peripheral vision. "How does the thought of playing executioner make you feel?"

"I find neither pleasure nor horror in it, nor disgust," I said, truthfully. "I would if he were an innocent person, but he's anything but innocent and barely qualifies as a person."

Permafrost made a disgusted noise. "Do you have to quantify _everything_?"

I paused for a moment to think about it. "Yes."

"A good executioner, or assassin for that matter," Shaw put in, "should be dispassionate. And with your abilities, you have the potential to be extraordinary. However—." Here he quit bending over me in favor of pacing back to Frosty Knickers' side of the sectional. "You have to give up this sentimental notion you have about innocent people. They're _humans_. They degrade, torture and kill each other all the time, innocent ones included. You think that because you refuse to kill a few of them is going to make a difference?"

"Ah, I remember this scene!" I perked up. "It's from The Third Man. Orson Welles as Harry Lime and his friend Hollister Martins, played by Joseph Cotton, up on a Ferris wheel. Lime points out how the people down below look like dots, and asks Martins if he would really feel any pity if any of them stopped moving. _Wonderful_ film—made by humans. How many mutant filmmakers are there yet?"

Shaw looked irked, but I went on. "You never know who is going to be important or why. Look at Piero da Vinci, a minor notary living outside of Florence in the 1400s. Had a peasant mistress when he was young, knocked her up, and wound up with a son born out of wedlock who they named Leonardo. Never did anything else significant in his life. His other children were perfectly ordinary. If Piero had died when he was two—no Vitruvian Man, no Mona Lisa, no Last Supper. The world would be a much poorer place."

"But it would never know it," Shaw pointed out. "You have to look at the bigger picture, Jenny."

"The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel," I nodded. "A _much_ bigger picture. And Michelangelo's father never did anything else that was significant in _his_ life either."

"You really enjoy baiting me," he said, and still he smiled, but the smile did not come anywhere near his eyes. "Why is that?"

"It's only tyrants who can't stand dissent, or that people around them should be capable of independent thought and action, " I replied, and I smiled too. "This way, I know you're all right."

He decided he liked that. "So you think I'm all right? That is nice. Very, very nice. You are going to be an outstanding asset to our cause, I can tell. Once you learn not to ask quite so many naive questions, that is, and develop a broader worldview.—Have you ever been to the Florida Keys?"

The question seemed like it had dropped in from another conversation altogether. "I—um, no. I haven't." I was about to say I had been to Disneyworld, but I couldn't remember what year it opened, which would be awkward if it didn't exist yet. But Florida—that explained what was going to happen to Hendry.

"I keep a yacht moored down there, the _Carpatica_. You don't get seasick, I hope?"

"No. Is this an invitation?" I asked.

Shaw nodded. "Yes. I would like you to join us on this little getaway cruise we're taking ten days from now. Emma, Azazel, Riptide, me, and now you. That ought to give you some time to get yourself some cruise wear. It'll only be a week or two—don't worry, I'll square it with the club." He laughed at his own joke.

"I can do that." Yeah. And it would give me some time to figure out what my powers could do to keep me from drowning. Alone with them on a boat in the ocean for a week or more? It would be so easy to get rid of me out there. I had already decided my role in this was not to make things easy for them. In fact, the more difficult I could make life for them, the better. "I'm looking forward to it already."

* * *

><p>AN: Reviews are always appreciated. I'd love to know if I got the tone of this chapter right. Thanks so much for reading!


	15. Confusion To The Enemy

"Colonel Hendry is here, so unless he magically traveled three thousand miles in the last ten minutes—Listen to me. I suggest you stop wasting my time." said Moira MacTaggert's superior to her over the phone. Someone murmured unintelligibly in the background. "I've got bigger things to deal with right now, MacTaggert!"

He hung up while she was still protesting, "Sir,—I!"

"Have you lost your mind?" her partner spluttered. "So now what?"

"We find an expert on genetic mutation. No," She reconsidered. "There was that Asian girl, Jenny. The one who didn't give me away. First, we wait for her to come out and we follow her. I don't know what side she's on or what her story is, but I bet it's worth finding out."

It was at least two more hours before the club shut down for the night, and half an hour after that before the employees started leaving. Moira was in danger of nodding off when her partner suddenly asked, "What's black and white and red all over?"

"Uh—a newspaper? A sun-burnt zebra?" she replied, remembering some of the answers for that playground riddle.

"Almost. Take a look. Come to me, my little lotus blossom—," He crooned. "—Wait. What the hell is wrong with her hands?"

"Oh," Moira said sweetly. "Did I mention she was a double amputee? Besides, you're married."

Lifting her camera, she looked through the telescopic viewfinder. 'Jenny' had left the club and was crossing the street, and she was wearing a chic little red jacket with zebra striped accessories. On reaching the parking lot on the other side, she unlocked a gleaming new sports car, got in, and drove off.

"After her." Moira ordered. She was the brighter by far of the two of them, but he was senior and he insisted on doing the driving.

They tailed the little blue car at a distance of half a block for several miles, until her car pulled into an apartment complex. Noting which apartment she went into, they followed her, and soon Moira was knocking on the door.

"Who is it?" a female voice came from inside. The door remained obdurately locked.

"You don't know me, but I saw you tonight at the Hellfire Club," Moira began. "I really need to talk to you—."

"A lot of people see me at the club," the voice said firmly. "I don't see any of them socially, men_ or_ women, and I especially don't see them late at night when I've just got home from work. I'm sure you're a very nice girl and I hope you meet somebody and are very happy with them, but if you don't leave _right now_, I'm calling the police."

Moira's partner stifled a laugh. "We outrank the police, miss. I'm sorry to be troubling you at this hour, but we are the CIA and it would help a lot if we could just come in for a moment."

A pause. "The CIA?" the voice asked doubtfully.

"Yes."

"I want to see some ID. You can stick it through the mail slot," instructed the voice.

He sighed. "You were the one who said we had to talk to her, so you get to give her yours."

Moira found the relevant card, and handed it in through the slot.

"It looks all right," the voice said. "Just a sec."

It was more than a second before the locks slid back, revealing a young woman dressed not in a naughty schoolgirl's uniform, but in a blue and white checked blouse and Capri pants such as anyone might wear. Her face, with its high, wide forehead and small, delicate chin, still gave an impression of supernal youth and innocence, but the conventional clothing and the change in her hair made her look wiser, more mature.

"All right." she said. "I hid it somewhere, and I'm not telling where, so if you kill me or kidnap me, you're going to have a fun time finding it. Otherwise, you get it back once _you're_ back on the other side of that locked door. Now, why are you here?"

"Can't we come in?" Moira asked, looking over her shoulder. The neighbor across the hall was peeking out at them.

"All right," Standing aside, Jenny let them in.

Moira, for one, had never been inside the home of anyone who wasn't white, so she looked around with some curiosity. Would there be pagan religious items on display, exotic wall hangings, the smell of strange spices in the air?

Apparently not. The only distinctly Asian touch was a bowl with a couple of fancy goldfish in it, and even that was debatable. From the shabby look of the furniture, she had taken the room furnished, like so many other single women did—as Moira had taken her own, in fact. Buying your own furniture, when you were a working woman, was a sign you were giving up and settling down into spinsterhood (because of course if you were a working woman, what you were actually doing was waiting for some man to come along and marry you.) So you took a furnished apartment and then did your best to brighten it up with your own things, like colorful throw pillows and inexpensive art prints. In that, they were alike.

Maybe Moira wouldn't have chosen exactly the same accents Jenny had—she would have had a bouquet of multicolored tulips in a white vase instead of white and yellow daisies in a dark blue one, but the one real difference was the number of books the Asian girl had around. She was a reader, and they _weren't _romance novels.

"So?" Her reluctant hostess reminded her why she was there. It was strange to see someone in prostheses stand there with her 'hands' on her hips. Moira could hardly stop staring in order to reply.

"It's about Colonel Hendry," Moira said. "How did he leave the club?"

The other woman blinked. "How would I know?" she asked, ingenuous as a kitten. Under questioning Jenny Song, who had seemed so intelligent, revealed herself to be a perky little ditz. Yes, she had served canapés to Mr. Shaw and his guests in the private suite. No, she didn't know what the meeting had been about; she never listened to what was going on because it was always boring. Maybe there had been a disagreement between Mr. Shaw and Colonel Hendry, if that was his name, but nobody had been shouting, so she wasn't sure. Yes, Mr. Shaw's one guest had left abruptly, but she didn't know why, it wasn't her business to know why.

Moira's partner ate it up with a spoon, and even Moira found herself questioning her own memory of what went on. Had she hallucinated it all? Then her partner asked the question "How did you, as handicapped as you are, manage to get hired for such a showcase job? I mean, not that you're not attractive, but your arms aren't."

"Well, it_ is_ the Hellfire Club," Jenny replied. "I mean, you don't get into hell by sitting around quietly cheating at solitaire. Between my arms and how I dress, I'm just enough of a transgression to really appeal to the members." It was a slip of the mask, a hint of the brain that lay behind those big, vacant- seeming eyes. She must have realized it, because she giggled and told them, "At least that's what Mr. Shaw says. I guess _you_ didn't see me in costume, did you? _She_ did."

"She wears this little schoolgirl-sailor uniform," Moira muttered. Her partner hadn't noticed the slip-up, and Jenny herself had decided not to be of any help. "We're very sorry to have bothered you."

"Well. Then good night," the other woman hinted. True to her word, she passed Moira's ID back through the mail slot once she was alone and the door was locked. It was covered in white flour.

On the way back to their car, Moira had to listen to her partner gripe some more, but then—.

Then a scrap of paper insinuated itself into her hand, as though someone had pressed it on her in passing, but no one was there. Opening it up, she read:

_Come back in two hours. Alone_.

Those were very long hours, made even longer because her partner wanted to come to her hotel room and 'talk'. He even brought a bottle of Scotch, and she had to remind him again that he was a happily married man. In the process, while wrestling out of his attempt at an amorous clinch, she filched the car keys from his pocket. She heartily regretted stripping down in front of him, but at the time it had seemed like a good idea. Finally he retired, and she was able to sneak out.

Jenny Song was waiting at the door. "I guess it's true that no good deed goes unpunished." said the girl. "Come in. Before I say anything more, let me tell you this: if you use my name and get me hauled in, I will ruin you by telling them all about our torrid lesbian love affair in vivid and salacious detail. I promise you that you'll have to quit your job, change your name, and move to another continent to escape the scandal. By the way, I'm not a lesbian, since now of course you're wondering."

"I—oh," Moira said, caught off-balance. "I understand. Why wouldn't you talk in front of him?"

"I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt—just barely—but he's about as smart as a box of left-handed hammers. You noticed my books, and when I showed off my brains. He didn't. Would you like some tea? I know it's late, and I know I need something. Sorry, but I don't have coffee."

"Yes. Please." Moira sat at the miniscule kitchen table, which had a sunny bowl of lemons on it, while her strange hostess busied herself at the counter. Picking a fruit from the bowl, she rolled it between her hands, enjoying the coolness of its bumpy peel. Tired to the point where everything seemed a bit surreal, she failed to notice that Jenny was not using her prosthetics, or even wearing them.

But when the Asian girl moved two cups and a tea pot to the table without seeming to touch them—_then_ she noticed. She dropped the lemon, which bounced away to roll into a corner unnoticed. "You—it is real!"

"Of course."

"But then you have to come back with me, you have to prove—."

"No, I don't," Jenny's tone was low pitched, not loud but vehement. "And if you try and make me I will ruin you. That wasn't a joke or a threat. It was a promise. You will be fucking sorry if you out me. The last time I trusted someone in authority, I wound up institutionalized for months. I'm willing to play ball with you because I think it would be useful to have someone I can pass information to. Believe me, you _will_ want what I've got to give."

Moira had heard the f-word before, but never from the lips of another woman. Given the difference between the girl's usual way of speaking and the foulness of that particular obscenity, it made her impassioned speech all the more intense. "What do you know?"

"What do you want to know?"

"First—who are you working for you? Whose side are you on?" Moira pounced.

"I'm on my own. I have my own reasons for being in the game. Let's just say I'm working…for the future, and I'm on the side of everybody who doesn't want to wind up extinct. Leave it at that. How old do your people think Shaw is?" Jenny asked.

"How old—Early fifties, late forties, something like that." she replied.

"Wrong. He was born Klaus Sebastian Schmidt, illegitimate son of one of the minor Hapsburg dukes and an American actress named Lenore Sebastian—in 1880." A pile of books and folders floated over to the table, and documents fanned out—birth certificate and photographs, Photostats of old newspapers.

"But that would make him over eighty years old!"

"Yes. And I have hands you can't see, Colonel Hendry traveled from Vegas to Washington in an eye blink by teleportation, and you saw a woman turn into living diamond today. Moving along, the Duke his father set his mistress and son up on a country estate, but he never settled money or property on them, so at his death when Klaus was seven, his legitimate family evicted them without a pfennig. Lenore went back on the stage—she was still in her twenties then—and eked out a living between that and various 'protectors'.

"That's where the trail goes a little fuzzy. He went to university and studied medicine, but neither Klaus nor Schmidt are exactly uncommon names. I wrote to all the universities in Germany from that era which still exist, and I found five Klaus Schmidts, no middle names given. The one I think most likely to be Sebastian is the one from Heidelberg. His thesis on Malthus's theories of population control sound the most like Shaw…these are things I haven't even put in my own private journals, by the way. These are the only copies extant in the USA that I know of. They're yours now."

"The CIA has a file more than six inches thick on Shaw, and none of this is in there—how did you find it out?"

"Shaw gets indiscreet when he's pounding Green Dragon cocktails. I listen. There's more…"

There was. "…While I have found mention of a Doctor Klaus Schmidt as having visited various different concentration camps, there's nothing to say what he did at any of them. This is only conjecture, but I think that among other things, he was collecting aberrations, freaks of nature, mutants among them. I also think that he experimented on mutants, to find out how their powers worked. At least one of them survived." Jenny sat back.

"You mean…you?" Moira asked.

"Me?" The Asian girl laughed. "No. A man by the name of Erik Lensherr. He would be in his thirties by this time. All I know about him right now, other than what I've already said, is that he's tall and blue-eyed. Anyhow, there you have it. There are plenty of gaps, but perhaps the CIA knows how to fill them in. You guys have a lot more resources than I do."

"Well, you can't prove that by me. This is good tea, by the way. Is it something special?"

"No, just tea bags from the grocery store. I can't find anything else around here."

"It's funny, that you can find all of this about someone on another continent from eighty years ago, but you can't find the tea you want," Moira remarked. Her fatigue was setting in again.

"I'm helped out a lot by the universal assumption that all women are a little bit stupid, and all foreigners are a little bit stupid, and all handicapped people are a little bit stupid. I make Shaw a trifle uneasy, but he doesn't see me as a threat. He_ can't_ see me as a threat, his mind doesn't work that way."

"Confusion to the enemy," Moira said, holding out her cup for a toast.

"And may always we know exactly who that is," Jenny returned. They clinked mugs.

"The question still is, why does he want to put nuclear missiles in Turkey?" Moira wondered aloud.

"I haven't found that out yet. When I do, I'll find a way to get it to you."

"Thank you. I—really don't know how to thank you. Nobody has ever done anything like this for me before. " She smiled at Jenny, shyly.

"You're quite welcome. I hope this is the beginning of a long and fruitful informant-agent relationship—because you ain't seen nothing yet."

* * *

><p>AN: I know everybody was expecting this to be the yacht scene where Erik and Charles (and presumably Joon-Yi) meet, but it wasn't. Surprise! I have no idea what Movieverse!Shaw's background is, so I made one up for him. And if Joon-Yi seems to trust Moira more than she usually trusts people, it's because she knows from the reading she's done that Moira is going to be one of the good guys.


	16. Selkie

Although in general a perceptive and intelligent man, Charles Xavier did have his blind spots. For example, he had not yet realized the reason he kept striking out with women was that no one believed Raven was actually his sister. They looked nothing alike, and what was more, they sounded nothing alike. Despite his American birth, his accent was identical to his British mother's, while Raven sounded as American as a girl could get. The general assumption was that she was his live-in girlfriend, and that he was approaching other women in order to proposition them for a threesome. The current object of his interest rather fancied the idea, which was why she hadn't shot him down yet.

As he was approaching the lithe and tanned blonde at the bar, however, a lovely woman with dark auburn hair blocked his way. He was quite happy to turn his amorous intentions on her, but that wasn't what she was there for…

* * *

><p>Today, for the first time, I actually feel like a mutant. My 'hands' are fine, they're useful—handy, in other words, but they're not exciting, not sexy. Just compensation for something I ought to have had to begin with. But today—.<p>

I am a **naiad**, I am a**_ selkie_**, I am a **_water dragon_**!

As part of my preparation for the cruise, I went out to Lake Mead to practice water survival, so that if Shaw or the Killing Frost decide to make me walk home from the middle of the ocean, I would have a ghost of a chance. I bought a swimsuit, and I'm post-post-ironic enough to buy a yellow polka-dot bikini—although by 2013 standards it is neither itsy-bitsy nor teenie-weenie. It is in fact quite modest, or at least it was before I lost the top. But that is getting ahead of myself.

I rejected the idea of a city pool because the Muggles (forgive me, J.K.!) would be apt to get overexcited if I were to experiment in their midst, one way or another. Lake Mead is fairly close and has no designated swimming area, hence no lifeguards, and it's large enough to have long stretches where no one would see me.

On the surface of things, you'd think I wouldn't be a very good swimmer, and indeed, on the surface of the water, I'm not. The side stroke, the breast stroke, the back stroke, the butterfly—if it requires the use of arms, I bob like a cork, thrash about uselessly and go nowhere fast. But underwater is a different story, always has been. Underwater I _earn_ that loathed nickname of 'Flipper'. Underwater, arms are a hindrance—that's why dolphins don't have them.

Evolution, people. Evolution. All the forward thrust, all the motive power comes from the tail, or in my case, the legs. The side fins are there for stability, steering, balance. I don't swim in my prostheses for the same reason I don't swim in shoes. Water gets in them, they impede movement, and they're apt to come off and get lost. Kind of like my bikini top.

I'd thought about buying swim fins, but I'm glad I didn't. The reason I didn't buy them is that I doubt Shaw and his coterie would wait for me to fetch them and put them on before they throw me overboard, and if I decide to jump ship, literally, on my own, I might not want to go and look for them either.

So anyhow, there I was at the lake. I went into the water, and I paddled around for a while feeling foolish and wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. Yes, I could do all those swimming strokes my disability prevented me from doing, but when out in the middle of the ocean, they weren't going to do me much good, were they? I couldn't swim nearly fast enough or far enough to make a difference.

Then it occurred to me—that energy field wasn't confined to my forearms and hands. It extended over my entire body. Shaw had pointed that out the night we met, and speculated that it could compensate for any other bits I might get amputated. By him. Possibly without benefit of anesthesia. That last part he didn't say aloud, but given his history, it seems likely.

But was it necessary that those bits get cut off first? Could I not manipulate the energy field in other ways? And so I concentrated on my feet. Those fins I didn't buy—I shaped them around my feet, tried them out, and found—to say 'it worked' is so dull and inadequate. That moment in a big science fiction movie when the huge starship goes into hyperspace? Closer. Not personal enough, though. The first time you get your menses, before the realities of cramps and acne set in, when you realize your life is forever changed, that you've crossed over from one state of being, childhood, into one you don't fully understand yet. Or perhaps the moment when you become a mother, when you hold your child for the first time, although that is something I can only imagine now. Yes, that's it. That is how life-changing this is.

The waters rushed around me, fingers of greenish daylight caressing me with their warmth, while feather-soft algae parted as I cleaved through it, startled fish darting away only to be swirled up in my wake. I was one of them, a silvered minnow in my element. Bubbles like bright little pearls tickling my skin—and then I had to come back up to the surface for air, because the blood pounded in my ears and my lungs burned. Not quite my element. I cannot breathe water. I cough and sputter like anything when I try. If I were meant to, I am sure I would have gills.

Looking around, I found I was much further out than I should have been. It is indeed a good thing I didn't try that in a city pool, because I would have wound up with a concussion and possibly neck injuries from ramming into the wall headfirst. Is my energy field hydrodynamic, allowing me to move through water with little or no resistance?

My second innovation—could I, like certain water bugs, bring air along with me? With some experimentation, I found out that yes, I can trap a bubble of it around my head. I can carry enough air to stay under for about ten minutes without moving, while holding on to a rock, but when I swim of course I burn through the oxygen much faster. Five minutes or less before sparkles dance around the edges of my vision and my head feels funny. When I try to bring more air, I can't go under. Too much buoyancy.

Clearly I haven't yet explored the full limit of my powers and I suspect I've only scratched the surface of potential applications. For instance, if I were to extend an airtight field around a person, they might quietly suffocate and die without noticing. Without ever even touching them, and that would solve a problem I'm faced with concerning Shaw. How to kill or disable him without expending energy, which he would just soak up? Carbon dioxide—totally passive. The only problem would be getting him alone…

I don't know when or where I and my top parted company, but I looked down and all of a sudden, whoops! Time to quit for the day. At least I had brought a cover-up, so I got home without being arrested. Tomorrow I will get up early and go shopping for half a dozen more—one piece suits only, of course. I'm not going to risk a wardrobe malfunction, not in front of Shaw and the Killing Frost. I will be doing a lot of swimming from here on out, and ugh, how I hate putting a wet swimsuit back on, so cold and clammy. Then it will be back to Lake Mead, and more practice.

And now I'm actually looking forward to this cruise! If only I were going with people I liked better. Or liked at all.

* * *

><p>"…I'm not sure what you need me for," Charles commented, perusing the materials Agent MacTaggert had given him. "Whoever wrote this has to be a mutant themselves, to have gotten this close to Shaw and his people and found out so much about their powers, their strengths and weaknesses…"<p>

"The person who gave them to me came forward on the condition that they should have total anonymity. It would be a breach of trust," Moira told him. Privately she wished that this Charles Xavier was a little more impressive looking. None too tall, a bit too young, and—well, he reminded her of a cocker spaniel puppy, with his wavy brown hair and soulful eyes.

"I suppose it could be worse. I could remind you of a Pekinese," He looked up from the pages.

"I'm sorr—wait a minute, I'm _not _sorry," she began and then rescinded. "I didn't say it out loud. It was a private thought. If you go listening in, that's the same as eavesdropping, and you can't expect to like everything you hear."

"I'm the one who should be sorry," he apologized charmingly. "It is more like overhearing what people say than like reading words on a page. You _were_ thinking it rather loudly. I can only hope I develop some gravitas over time, or I fear I'll never be able to discipline a classroom. Besides—from what I can tell, you like dogs."

"Not that much," she retorted.

"Whoever wrote this," he ignored her last remark, "I really want to meet him. His theories concerning mutant diversity—wait. It isn't a him? It's a_ her_?"

"Now that really is going too far," Moira wanted to get up and stride away from him forever.

"I really am sorry. It just surprised me, that's all."

"Well, quit it. Are you interested or not?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, I am."

* * *

><p>AN: A naiad is a water spirit from Greek Mythology, one which prefers fresh water to salt. The selkie of Scottish folklore is like a mermaid, only she's half seal rather than half fish and can become human by taking off her seal skin. Asian dragons are not the fire breathers of European myth, but usually intelligent guardians and benevolent spirits connected to water and rain. Watch Spirited Away for examples. Thank you so much, Kate! I put a lot of thought into what paintings would best represent them.


	17. Exit Colonel Hendry

A/N: I have to warn you, I have a cold and am writing under the influence of medication. I think this is a good chapter but I am also wandering around my place bumping into things. If I have embarrassed myself please let me know and I will take it down for a rewrite.

* * *

><p>So here I am on board the <em>Carpatica<em>, in my private cabin. It is only slightly larger than my cell in Mutant Prison was, but it does have a porthole and is really rather attractive, painted in shades of white and blue, with cleverly fitted cabinets and shelves. Sea birds wheel and cry beyond my porthole, cutting arcs against the blue, and I have taken off my prosthetics and put them in my suitcase. Going without them no longer feels weird.

Mind you, both the bunk here and the bunk in my cell share one characteristic—straps to hold the occupant in place, but here they are nominally meant to keep one from rolling out when the sea is choppy, and the door locks from the inside. We have not yet set out to sea. Shaw says he is waiting on someone. I can guess who.

There are no extra people on board—only mutants. Shaw is Captain, Frost-is-on-the-Pumpkin is First Mate, har har, while Riptide and Azazel are crew. I am to be Ship's Cook, having no other seaworthy skills. And to his credit, Shaw made a point of apologizing for having me assume a such a menial role, but that humans can't be altogether trusted at the present time. Implying, at the same time, that at some point in the future, there will be plenty of grateful servile humans. Hmmm.

I warned him that I was a single girl and mostly out of practice in a kitchen, as it's too much trouble to cook an elaborate meal for myself alone. However, being Ship's Cook will mostly be a matter of making breakfast, it seems. Lunch is to be scrounged when and as you want it, there being plenty of luxury foodstuffs like smoked pheasant and preserved oysters, and for dinner there are places ashore where they are happy to prepare whatever you caught during the day and supply appropriate side dishes. We shall see—there is nothing like leathery eggs and crunchy grounds in the coffee to convince people that I should not be allowed anywhere near the ship's mess. But then I would have to ruin my eggs too—and the coffee pot is a percolator, which means I could hardly make the coffee any worse than it is to begin with.

We came here by private plane—it remains to be seen how I shall be getting back to Las Vegas, if indeed I ever return there at all. I have a feeling that I will not be with Shaw and his people much longer, not a premonition of my death, just a feeling that when I am in on the secret, I will want to get as far away from them as possible. It is for the best; Shaw has that oddly attractive, even seductive side—not seductive in the sense of getting into my panties, but he wants to be loved, or worshipped, rather. He is very good at figuring out what a person wants to hear, and pouring that poison back into one's ear.

Fortunately for the sake of mutantkind, while he's been talking his smarmy trash into 'Jenny's' ears, it's Joon-Yi who's been doing the listening. I understand better now, how it is that Erik Lensherr became/will become/may become Magneto (Time travel and the English language have not caught up to one another yet.) It is not Hitler whose venomous treacle he absorbed; it was Shaw-Schmidt's. Hitler told him he and his people were filth. Schmidt told him he and his kind were gods. Who then did he listen to?

I wonder if I will meet hi—I am being called up on deck.

* * *

><p>Colonel Robert Hendry felt inside his jacket, reassuring himself that his 'life insurance' was still there—a live hand grenade. He was not greatly comforted. Looking up the pale gold beach to the dock and the boat beyond it, he wondered if he ought to cut his losses and go. But then what would he have betrayed his principles and his country for? For nothing at all? For a little champagne, some flattery and the services of a couple of call girls? No, better to get his two hundred thousand dollars and then go off to some little country that was far too small for anyone to bother lobbing a nuke at.<p>

Yet he did not trust these bizarre people—hence the hand grenade. His heart protested at being made to climb the stairs, and the soreness in his arm that he'd felt all morning was going from a simple ache to an active twinge. Reaching the deck, he looked around at the elegant party boat, seeing Emma Frost sunning herself on a chaise longue, one of the other freaks polishing some fitting, a third, that gook girl Jenny, cutting up pineapple and putting it into a blender.

"Still drinking champagne, Bob?" Shaw asked, welcoming him aboard.

"I will pass," the colonel snarled out.

"Okay! Well, so much for the pleasantries. I was wondering who you might have told about our little arrangement."

"No one," the colonel replied. Shaw dragged in on a cigar, and looked to Frostbite, lounging around on a deck chair looking like she was sculpted of ice cream and drizzled with caramel. "He's telling the truth." she said.

"Good! Well, I guess we're done here. Let's wrap things up, shall we?" Shaw gestured to Riptide, who strolled over the deck in a way that was a little too casual.

"Hold it!" Hendry brought out the grenade. "Oh, I knew better than to trust you. Now you will let me walk out of here with my money, or I will pull this pin and we will all die."

Shaw sauntered over, the picture of nonchalance. "Go ahead. Do it."

"I'll do it, I'll swear to God—!"

Pacing closer, Shaw came to Hendry, although the Colonel was backing away, sweat bedewing his brow. His head was pounding and his arm hurt.

"No, You won't do it." Sebastian Shaw reached him, reached out for the grenade. The very bones in the Colonel's hands might have melted to jelly for all the strength he had to prevent Shaw from simply reaching out and taking the thing.

Backing off a step or two, Shaw said, "But I will." And he did, pulling the pin, flinging it away-and then those two seconds wait before the chemical reaction began. In that time dilation effect which sometimes overcomes those about to die, Hendry saw that neither the icy bitch Frost nor that Riptide were perturbed enough to yawn. Only that kimchee girl Jenny looked at all concerned, and that was at something happening down on the docks. Then the grenade went off in a ball of orange, and Shaw caught it, his hands seeming to stretch and multiply , blurring and compressing the explosion into a whisper, and wrapping it up into his chest.

"Y-you're one of them?" Hendry blurted out in horror. Damn, but his left arm was hurting like hell and he didn't know why.

"Very astute of you, Colonel Hendry. You want to guess what I can do? I can absorb energy—it keeps me young. That's the boring part. The fun part comes with what I can do with the stuff once I've got it."

"Shaw," said Jenny, "There are military police on the dock. It seems they are seeking Colonel Hendry."

"Damn!" Shaw dampened down the plume of white dancing in the cage of his fingers. The Colonel stumbled away, his skin gone the color of unbaked clay. He looked from the mutants to the dock below, the stairs which lead up to the Caspartina. From the look on his face, one would have thought him not saved but damned. The military had sent a Major to arrest a Colonel, but one with authorization from the General Chiefs of Staff. He was to stand down and place himself under arrest as becoming an officer in the armed services, to face charges of treason, cowardice under fire, misconduct. The details were reaching his ears but not making it all the way to his brain, and his arm stabbed at him. He was drenched all over in cold sweat and, and, and the light had gone so white…The Major apologized for disturbing them as his men led the Colonel away.

Up on deck, the mutants were still a little in shock as well. "What fortuitous timing," Shaw commented. "Because I forgot for a moment there that this was to be Jenny's initiation. It would be much, much better for all concerned if the Colonel never made it into custody. Do it, Jenny. Do it now, and make it look like natural….Ah, you're on it already. _Very_ good…"

Hendry collapsed halfway down the dock, despite the best efforts of the MPs. There was a great deal of confusion as one ran for a first aid kit, and their attempt at resuscitation was not a success.

Right before their eyes, Hendry was pronounced dead of a massive coronary, pending the results of a formal autopsy.

* * *

><p>I am responsible for Colonel Hendry's death. I did not kill him, but I was responsible, for I gave Moira MacTaggert information about him from Shaw's files, not knowing whether or not Military Intelligence knew what he had done in Korea. If they knew, then they wouldn't care about anything but keeping it under the rug. But if they didn't know, and from what happened here today, they didn't seem to—when they came to collect them, it was when an already stressed Hendry went from having a minor cardiac event to a fatal one.<p>

Shaw believes I did kill him, so now I am One Of Them. I feel a little sick from all the excitement. Not over the death—but because now I know the future can be changed. It can be! Instead of becoming a great unsolved mystery, Colonel Hendry suffered a fatal heart attack and died while being taken into custody.

And everyone is pleased with me, so, so pleased. I smile and blush and demur—. Until Shaw brings out the briefcase full of money. "Your first kill fee, " he says. "Ten percent of the money I was going to have to pay him. Twenty thousand. Here you go."

He tries to hand it over, but I hold up a finger to stop him. "Can't you be my banker for now, and hold it for me? I mean, the ponies came through for me at the race track right before this trip, so I've got thousands and thousands burning a hole in my handbag already. Wait, I'm going to get some of it so you can hold it for me too. Otherwise, I'll go shopping and I'll see this and I'll see that and the next thing you know, it'll all be gone."

I went back to my cabin, where I got out an envelope with exactly seven thousand dollars in it. Seven months ago Shaw had made me out a stipend of a thousand dollars a month. I hadn't used it, and now I was about to return it. A symbolic gesture, maybe, but I wanted to be able to say, truthfully, that I had never taken any money of his. What I made at the club was one thing. That was money I'd earned.

"There," I said. "Now you're my banker for twenty seven thousand dollars."

"So it seems," Shaw put it in his safe. "Don't worry, I'll take very good care of it."

"I know you will," I smiled. "And is it okay to go swimming here?" I felt the need to cleanse myself more and more, the longer I was around them.

"How well do you swim?" he asked.

"Well enough," I temporized. Why advertize a skill I was counting on to save my hide?

"Then go ahead and have fun, but at six we have reservations at Papa's Grill. It's fairly elegant, and you can't show up in a swimsuit and shorts." he said, in his paternal mode.

"Don't worry, I'll be done in plenty of time and I have a lovely tangerine ensemble I've been saving for the right occasion."

"I'm quite proud of what you've done today," his hand darted out to trap my elbow. "Going without your artificial arms, keeping a cool, calm head while Hendry was bleating, then finishing him off without any of that sentimentality you're prone to—. I'm glad I was right about you." The pressure on my arm was a warning, not painful in any way, not yet.

"Then I'm glad too, because there is nothing more important to me than the future of mutantkind. I would give all I could, even to my life if I have to, to ensure that in the future, mutants will prosper and thrive. You could ask Emma if I'm telling the truth, and I hope you will. It's all I want." I poured it on with lots of melted butter, and his grasp because a caress.

"You will be part of it," he said. "I promise you that."

As we parted there in the hallway, I vowed to myself that he would not be part of the future of mutantkind, not in any way, not at all.

* * *

><p>AN: Kimchee, a fermented cabbage dish with some similarities to sauerkraut, is the most popular condiment in Korea, and is sometimes used as a way of saying 'that's good', or as a term of endearment. Or it can be turned around and used as an insult, like saying a black person just _**loves **_watermelon.

Next chapter…A man, a woman, a romantic cruise. Meeting for the first time under the stars, with the moonlight streaming down. What could be more perfect?

Until he takes her in his manly arms and throws her overboard just before he wrecks the bloody boat, that is.


	18. Enter Erik

I dressed for dinner that night with extra care. Spending my nights at the Hellfire Club as I did, dressed and made up to look ten years younger than I am—well, it was nice to be able to dress like a grownup for a change, and I hadn't had a chance to wear that cocktail outfit yet. Sad reflection on my social life, huh?

Yet even as I got ready, I had the sense that I wasn't dressing for dinner so much as I was girding myself for battle, as though the top with its iridescent gold pailettes was a mail shirt, the jacket's ruched and upturned collar a gorget to protect my neck from blades. I put my hair up with gold filigree pins, which went in like an assassin's daggers into their sheathes, and the shimmer I brushed on my eyelids, the paint I dabbed on my mouth were there to intimidate my enemy.

I felt as gorgeous as Gong Li when I was done! (I don't say I _was_ as gorgeous as Gong Li, as that isn't really possible even for her without several makeup artists, hairstylists, and wardrobe assistants, but I felt like I was.) Even Frosty Knickers' little dig about my fondness for vivid color could not dent my self esteem. I merely replied that in nature, small and seemingly defenseless creatures that were brightly colored were also usually quite deadly, like coral snakes and poison dart tree frogs. At dinner (I had grilled swordfish. It was delicious.) I smiled and laughed and made small talk, just as I should, but I was waiting, waiting to finally learn what Shaw was up to. Because of course he didn't want full-scale nuclear war. He couldn't want that.

Except that he did. '…The remaining human population, I'm estimating about ten percent of those alive today, will be sufficiently irradiated that their offspring will all be mutants." He concluded.

"Da," Azazel nodded. "And the skies of the world will be darkened with the smoke of her burning cities. Glorious."

For my part, the only reason I had managed to sit still and listen quietly up until then was that I knew for a fact that it wouldn't happen. Otherwise I would have been_ very_ upset. Irrational, even. But now it was time to remove him from the world, if I could. For that, I could have used isolation and sleeping pills, but needs must. He could not be allowed to go on living. The best thing I could do was be a distraction, and work on him while his attention and everyone else's was on me.

"I see," I nodded. "And you estimate that the current ratio of humans to mutants is what?"

"About one hundred to one," he replied, smiling. "Give or take a few."

"So with a world population of roughly four billion, you propose to reduce it to four hundred forty million. You've stockpiled food for that many people for five years, plus seed stock for replanting? How did you ever manage it?"

His smile slipped. If he had noticed the energy field that now encased his head at a distance of about six inches, he gave no sign of it. Nor did Frostbite. "What…are you talking about?"

Five minutes for his oxygen to run out, that was all I needed. Five minutes. Could I vamp that long? Maybe not. But I _could_ bitch that long. Especially when he handed me so much material to fuel it.

"It would take several years for the environment to recover to the point where arable land will produce food crops again." I paused. "You mean to say you don't have that much food stockpiled? Or seed stock? Do you have any at all? Don't you know what will happen after the bombs fly?" I don't get loud when I get mad, but I am told I grow quite intense.

"I don't think I like your tone of voice—" Shaw began, but I had a head of steam and would not be silenced.

"You're old enough to remember Tunguska, how sunsets all over the world were redder for years afterward, and that was only a meteor strike in a remote forest." The event in question had taken place in 1909. "The nuclear bombs of today will be as powerful as _three_ Tunguskas _each_. The dust, debris and smoke they kick up will take years to settle, and in the meantime, the sunlight will be blocked out. It's called a 'Nuclear Winter'. There is some debate over whether it will actually get very cold, or whether it will actually heat up the Earth, but either way it will mean catastrophic global climate change.

"Every food crop will die. All the trees will die. All the insect pollinators will die—bees, butterflies, wasps, mosquitoes, all the rest, so even when planting can begin again, the only food crops that will yield are those which self-pollinate or are wind-pollinated. Hand pollination really only works for horticultural purposes, not widespread agriculture.

"So. I hope you like oatmeal with salt, because there won't be much else. No honey, no fruit, no onions, nothing in the cabbage, broccoli, or kale family. No turnips, no melons, no chocolate, no sugar cane. No tangerines. No citrus fruit at all! No strawberries, no tomatoes, no lentils. Hundreds of others, as well…. All the animals raised for meat will be gone, either eaten or starved to death because they ate insect pollinated food crops. So no wool, no leather, no cotton. No flax, so no clothes. The silk worms will be gone, so no silk either.

"And even if you have seed stock, it had better all be what is known as 'heirloom' seeds, ones which have been grown and saved for the next growing season for time immemorial, because modern seeds grown for the mass market on stock farms are bred for one growing season only and sprayed with anti-fungal coatings. Yes, they're high yield and tasty, but they don't breed true. The next generation will be small, low yielding, taste terrible, and be prone to every blight there is."

Up until then I think sheer disbelief still had them frozen, but now they were starting to look very angry. That was all right. Angry burned oxygen faster. "I put my lipstick on with more care than you seem to have put into this plan. My shoes were designed with more intelligent thought. Luckily I know it will never work. Fifty years will come and go. You will be dead and nigh forgotten. And the nukes. Will. Not. Fly." I smiled derisively, showing my teeth, and circled around behind the chairs.

That really riled him. "What?" Good, oh, good, he was breathing heavily!

"My memory works two ways; I remember the future as well as the past, up to the year 2013. It's a gift I never told you I possessed. But before you order them to kill me, let me just finish by saying I never expected better of Herr Doktor Klaus Schmidt. 'Nazi Scientist' is an _**oxymoron**_. Your plan is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of in my life, and you don't even have the excuse of being of subnormal intelligence."

I struck preemptively, boxing Azazel's ears by clapping my hands on them both, hard and at the same time. It can cause hearing damage, always causes pain and disorientation. His teleportation made him the most unpredictable and he was a deadly hand with a blade, but when he couldn't concentrate he couldn't teleport. While he was still reeling, I seized him by the tail, swung him around in mid air and let him fly out over the ocean. Done with him for the moment.

Then it was Riptide's turn. As yet, I could still keep Shaw bottled up and deal with his lackeys, but I had only so much attention and concentration. Riptide—Ideally I would set up a counter spiral against him, but I wasn't nearly as powerful as he was. However I could keep him off balance by tossing things at him from behind. Then Shaw sat down heavily, shaking his head. His hand went to his forehead, spanning his temples. "E—Emma," he gasped. "I—something's wrong." Yes, oh yes! Just a little longer, just a little….

"What are you doing to him?" I-am-My-Own-Best-Friend (diamonds, get it?) socked me in the eye while in diamond form. The left eye, to be precise. Which threw me off my feet and sent me flying backward against the railings by the hatchway. That broke my concentration, because it felt as though my eye had exploded. I even felt to make sure the eyeball was still there and not a pulpy mash of vitreous humor, blood and shredded cornea. Shaw drew in breath, and he raised his head again.

"No," I cried out. Permafrost leapt up at me, launching herself to deliver a spinning kick to my midsection, which would have broken my ribs and possibly even killed me, except she kicked a piece of steel grillwork instead. Chips and shards of diamond flew everywhere, and she fell to the deck saying a lot of very unladylike things, not that I'm one to talk. But where had the grillwork come from? I hadn't put it there, I was hurting too much to visualize something like that.

"So at last you have been found, Schmidt," said a quietly powerful voice from behind me. I looked, and looked up at a tall, muscular man in a wetsuit. A wet wetsuit, as it happened. "Found and found out." Blue eyes, square jaw with a cleft, dangerous air—since when was I in a James Bond movie?

"Erik Lensherr?" Shaw asked, still wheezing a little. "Kleine Erik Lensherr? Is that you? Oh, so that's it. She's _yours_."

"What?" asked Mr. Wetsuit(which left nothing to the imagination, by the way). "I've never seen her before," just as I protested., "Like _hell_ am I anybody's. You think I wouldn't want to kill you just on your own merits?"

Then the name caught up with me. "Wait a minute—_you're_ Erik Lensherr?"

"Yes—why?"

"I had no idea you would look like this when you were young." I said. Possibly one of the stupidest statements ever to come out of my mouth. _This_ was what Mr. Magnussen had looked like in his prime? Time had an awful lot to answer for.

He regarded me for a split second. "Have you ever fought anyone before?" he asked.

"No. I suppose it shows."

"It does. Are you a good swimmer?"

"Like a dolphin," I said. Then he scooped me up and threw me overboard. Consequently, I missed what happened on the boat…

A/N: Gong Li is probably most famous in the States for her movie Curse of The Golden Flower, in which she plays an Empress whose family makes the Borgias look like they're still on the playground. An oxymoron is a self contradicting term, like 'jumbo shrimp'. The science behind Joon-Yi's rant on the effects of nuclear war is broadly correct, given that she's delivering it off the cuff and isn't an expert on it. It's all mostly theory anyway until there actually is a nuclear war. And Tunguska, Siberia was the site of a mysterious event in 1909 which knocked down approximately eighty million trees and broke windows in houses miles away.

Still have a cold, still medicated, writing anyway. Thank you so much to my reviewers Penguin Snuggles and 4everyoung93! I do love reviews, they're part of the mix which fuels a story. Hope you enjoyed this chapter!


	19. Charles Xavier

Another mutant? A woman, too, young and one who was emphatically not Schmidt's creature, from what he had overheard. Ordinarily, discovering someone _like him_ would have taken precedence over all else, but not _now_, not when Schmidt was staring back at him from less than ten meters away. Whoever, _whatever_ she was, she had no more idea of self-defense than a child. So Erik picked her up—she was absurdly tiny—and dropped her over the side, hoping she could swim as well as she claimed. She might not deserve to die, after all. A startled yelp and a splash

"Now—," he turned back to Shaw. But the diamond creature had changed back into a woman, and though she howled with pain, rolling on the deck and holding a foot from which blood spurted— her jaw jutted out, and something twisted between him and her. Her pain, he felt it too, and it ripped through him, picking up on half-forgotten visceral flesh-memories and amplifying them, and so many of them involved Schmidt.

Schmidt himself came to stand over him, but he was unsteady, red-faced and sweating from whatever it was the girl had done to him. "He's here to kill you," the icy blonde said, fashioning a tourniquet for herself from one of her sleeves.

"Tch…tch…tch," Schmidt shook his head. "First Jenny and now you—Disloyalty is the cruelest cut of all."

"Then here's one to compare it to," Erik snarled, and threw his knife at that loathed face. The woman flashed back into diamond, knocked it away so it skittered over the deck—but he still had his powers, and it curved back around.

Schmidt dodged, so it only creased his scalp, tearing a flap of skin loose. Blood sprang out—scalp wounds always bled enthusiastically—the German swore, then shouted. "Riptide!"

A great _whoosh_ from somewhere behind Erik—and a whirlwind picked him up and dumped him in the water as well, bruising him on the deck rails as he went over. That was when the Coast Guard showed up.

* * *

><p>Charles Xavier stood on the deck of the Coast Guard ship, binoculars in hands, not at all enjoying the sensation that his balls were trying to retreat back up inside his abdomen for safety. "I'm sorry," he said to Moira, and to Mr. Black, the one man among the entire CIA who was positive and supportive of mutants, "I confess I'm fraught with a sense of impending disaster. Moira's informant made it very clear that attacking Shaw and his people using conventional methods will be futile at best, and at worst—doomed."<p>

"But what does that leave us with, then?" Mr. Black asked. "Gas would disperse over the water. We can't simply bomb them. There may be innocent people on board!" He had to shout, at the end, to be heard over the megaphone, the outboard motors and the klaxons.

"I don't know," Charles admitted, miserably, a kicked puppy. "I don't—look out!"

A figure appeared on the deck of the _Caspartina_, hands spread out, palms facing up. Something wispy and white curled and flowed between his fingers, growing rapidly into twin cyclones that he loosed upon the approaching speedboats, miniature Maelstroms that sucked them under.

Two more waterspouts—but then something else happened. The great anchor and chain of the _Caspartina_ groaned, clanked, and flew through the air, attacking its own ship, plunging through the decks with a mighty crash, splintering wood and shattering glass. Wrapping itself around the ship like a sea serpent out of legend, it began to squeeze—and squeeze.

But a dark shape dropped down out of the hull of the beleaguered ship, deep under the water. Moving slowly at first, it began to gain speed. "Is that a—is that a submarine?" Moira asked.

Yes, it was. "Wait!" Charles shouted. "There's someone else out there. There's someone out there—he's going to drown." The Coast Guard vessel was now concerned with rescuing its own, the men whose boats had been swamped by the artificial tornados. Dashing for the side, Charles shed his jacket, and dove into the ocean.

* * *

><p>Erik had come too far, had come so close—. His exhilaration when the anchor plowed great furrows through the polished mahogany decks was short-lived. When the metal creaked and ground together in a way he knew he did not cause, and then the sub dropped down out of the boat like a whale calving its pup, it died. Was his mentortormentor to escape him now? Failure was not to be borne. He would not allow himself to fail. Reaching out with his power of magnetism, he drew—not the sub towards himself, for he knew it to be too big for him to handle, but himself to the submarine's metal hull.

Once he was hanging on to it, he would have to find a hatch, rend it open, and then—but there was precious little time to think of that, and even less oxygen. His lungs screamed already at being halted in their action. **No.** A voice, in his head? Not a woman, not that skimmed-milk creature of Schmidt's. A man. **You have to let go**. **I know what this means to you, Erik, but it's too big. You have to let go.**

Then there were arms around him, a face next to his, but there was no time for that, because a silver-headed shape was streaking towards him. A torpedo? No, it wasn't metal—.

Then his head—no, _their_ heads were out of water, all three of them. It was the girl, she was the torpedo and its silver head was a bubble of air, blessed breathable air. The orange garment she wore shimmered like fish scales. "There is _maybe_ three minutes of oxygen in this air with three people breathing it and I can't go back up for more and come back down, I'd never catch up again. So hurry up and scuttle it or whatever you have to do to sink it permanently and _let's go_. Shaw will be just as dead." she said rapidly.

"I can't," Erik replied. "I have to see his face as he dies. I must watch him die, as he watched me while they shot my mother."

"That is only the second stupidest thing I've heard in my—Actually, you have a point. Their teleporter could probably save them. Then Shaw won't die today, but he will soon. I promise you he will not live to see December." she spoke ardently, but low, as though to a lover in bed. "I will help you kill him, in any way, in any place."

"Um—I don't think you should be encouraging him to kill anyone—." the telepathic man gasped.

"Stay out of this!" Erik and the girl snapped at him in unison, but she went on to say, "You don't know what he's done or what he wants to do. Believe me, if you did, you'd want to kill him too."

"You're Moira's insider!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, am I?" she asked, with a cutting edge in her voice. "Has she been telling tales out of school?"

"No, I picked it from your mind just now—please don't blame her."

"How—Oh, you're inside my energy field. As is a decreasing amount of free oxygen. Erik,_ please_. My eye…doesn't like the increase in pressure. I don't want to wind up half blind."

Startled, he looked into her face. Her left eye had no white left to it—all was black, but given the dimming light, it was probably red. She was in pain, and she was the first person in many years to offer him unconditional aid. "All right." He let go, and they shot up through the water together.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because the future Shaw, or Schmidt, as you like, makes is a very bad one for mutants, even though there is no World War III. I'm Joon-Yi Song, by the way."

"And I'm Charles Xavier," added the telepath. "Very pleased to meet you. I had no idea Florida was home to such beautiful mermaids, or I would have visited it before."

"I don't come from Florida and I'm not a mermaid," she corrected him. "They're amphibious. I'm an air breather. But thank you all the same."

"I thought I was alone," Erik said, as they broke the surface so hard and fast they breached it like a leaping seal. "But here you are. Here you both are."

"You're not alone, Erik. We're not alone," Charles Xavier said, grinning. "OVER HERE!" He waved an arm, shouting to get the Coast Guard's attention.

"I don't think they're going to find us," Erik said. He was glad of it, wanting nothing to do with any branch of government or law enforcement—and yet they had come quite a way from the land. The dock was only a line of bright dots in the distance, the Guard ships, a few more dots scattered here and there.

"Aren't the Northern Lights a form of magnetism?" Joon-Yi asked, treading water. "The Aurora Borealis, I mean."

"Yes," Erik said, glancing at her. What had she meant when she said, _'I had no idea you would look like this when you were young._'? She had as good as said she could see the future. Would they know each other when they were old? He had never thought he would live to get old.

"Then can you send them up a flare?" she asked.

"I've never tried…" He could, and before long, they could see one of the motorboats coming out for them.

TBC…

* * *

><p>AN: A brief one this time. Hectic time at work lately as well as a cold. Dialog will sometimes follow First Class and sometimes be different, given the changing circumstances. BTW, Charles hasn't yet realized how different Joon-Yi is. Will he still be flirting with her once he realizes what she's missing? Stay tuned.


	20. Codeine And Complications

I liked Xavier immediately, not because he was interfering with my thoughts to make me like him, as Frostbite had at the very beginning, but because he looked so…nice. Not as movie-star handsome as Erik, no, but he had an open, engaging manner and his boyish enthusiasm made him appealing and attractive. Not to mention much more approachable.

"I hope you don't mind my asking," he said, pausing to cough out some seawater, (We were all treading water while waiting for the Coast Guard to swing by in a motor boat and pick us up.) "What nationality is Joon-Yi? I mean your name, not you, because if you aren't American then you're doing the best imitation I've ever heard."

"It's Korean," I replied. "It means…Rose Peony." I don't know exactly why I told him my fiction and not the truth, but my eye was hurting at about six on my personal scale of one to ten with one being a blister on my heel and ten having my teeth knocked out. It had been at an eight and rising as I was hanging on to the submarine. (Nine was food poisoning after an iffy tuna sandwich eaten one afternoon during exam week of my sophomore year in college, in case you're wondering.) That put it on about the same footing as a really bad period. Not so bad, I thought.

"Rose Peony? What a lovely name, but I'm not surprised. Pretty girls always have pretty names."

"Nomenclature isn't destiny, and a good thing, too." I began. Then the boat's searchlight hit me, and the pain zoomed up to nine. "AAAagh," is the best I can do for what I screamed, and the end of it was more of a gurgle because my head went under for a second.

"What's wrong?" Xavier asked.

"The light," I explained. "My eye—."

Xavier swam over and had a look. "I think you definitely need medical attention. Here—! " he called to the Guard. Being female and injured, I got helped into the boat first. "What happened to your arms?" he exclaimed in dismay. Since I had been out to dinner with Shaw and his cohorts, I still had my prostheses on, which was a good thing as otherwise they would have been at the bottom of the harbor along with the slowly sinking _Caspartina_. Actually, it was a wonder that they weren't there anyhow. My shoes were.

It isn't as if I'm not used to that question or even that reaction, but you know, coming from him, that really stung. I knew who he was. I knew almost as much about him as I knew about Magneto. The gentle humanitarian, (mutanitarian?) the great educator—He should not have been so shocked.

"These are prostheses." I considered saying that my real hands got caught in a rice picker when I was a child, because if it's a good enough excuse for Classic!Spock, it's good enough for me. But I didn't. "What do you _think_ happened? I'm a mutant. I was born this way. The technical term is bilateral limb-deficiency phocomelia. Personally, I believe this is an adaptation to maximize my swimming speed, along with a hydrodynamic energy field that allows me to bring air along and compensates for my lack of hands in other ways."

It might even have been true, in a way. For all that the mutant gene complex has been identified, nobody pretends they know what makes one person a telepath and another a pyrokinetic. Maybe my mutation chose the form it did for a reason.

"I'm sorry," Xavier said. He did look chastened.

"I'm not," Erik commented, climbing in. "You are who you are supposed to be. You weren't exaggerating when you said you swam like a dolphin."

"Thank you." That was something like Mr. Magnussen might have said. What was more, he meant it. "I'm even better when my eye isn't threatening to explode." I was keeping it shut. Whatever had happened to it, it was now abnormally sensitive to light.

"About what's going to happen," Xavier sat forward. "What is it that Shaw causes, exactly?"

"Ne pas devant le gendarmerie," _Not in front of the Guards_, I said, hoping he knew enough French to understand.

"Ah," Erik perked up slightly. Muted anger seemed to hang about him like a cloud of smoke, in every line of face and body. "Parlez-vous Francais, Mademoiselle?"

"Un peu, et tres mal," I replied. _A little, and very poorly_. "In fact, that is about the extent of my French, beyond…food terms." I had nearly said 'restaurant menus', but I was afraid it would come across as a hint. "My Korean is much better, despite being raised in America."

All this mouth noise we were making was not bad as a cover-up for my increasing nervousness. I did not want to step into the purview of the CIA. I most truly and definitively did not want to put myself in their power, but at the moment, I saw no alternative.

Xavier noticed. "What's the matter?" he asked.

"The last time I trusted the authorities," I told him, "I wound up institutionalized for months. Not because my sanity was under any doubt, or because of any criminal act, but because it was a convenient way of dealing with me. It happens sometimes to people who are different. So I'm wondering what will happen this time."

"Oh, it's all right," he said, his face breaking into a reassuring smile. "You know Moira, and while you haven't met Mr. Black yet, he's very open-minded."

"Open minded is nice. It's their open doors policy I'm worried about," I replied. "I'm not in the best situation at the moment. I don't have my ID, I don't have any money on me, my luggage is rapidly sinking to the bottom of the bay, I don't even have any shoes, and I need an eye doctor."

"You don't have to worry about leaving if you want to leave," Erik muttered.

About then we pulled up to the big boat, where Moira was very surprised to see me. I met Mr. Black, who was stout, homely and amiable, and then I met the ship's doctor, who told me I had a subconjunctival hemorrhage and traumatic iritis—or rather, I told _him_ that after he told me the white of my eye was bruised and my pupil was stuck in the open position, slowly and loudly so my tiny little brain would be able to take it in.

Then he wised up and told me I would need to see an eye doctor, but generally a steroid to decrease the inflammation and a cycloplegic to temporarily paralyze the ciliary body would fix things in a few days—but not to do anything that would increase pressure either internally or externally. He taped a hard eye patch over it, and that was that.

Except that he also gave me some codeine for the pain. Rather a lot of codeine, because I told him I was a poor metabolizer. (Pharmacological talk: codeine converts to morphine in the liver, and it's the morphine that does the painkilling. Poor metabolizers need more codeine than most people. However, I failed to take into account that paroxetine interferes with codeine metabolism, so my data was incorrect. Well, how would I have known, since the only times I ever took codeine I was already on paroxetine?)

If anything, I am a rapid metabolizer. So from there on my memory starts to get blurry. I went in and out of a doze, during which time someone found me a couple of pairs of thick socks so I would have at least that much on my feet, and I acquired a blanket somewhere. I know Moira came by to check on me, and I told her it was okay, we were still friends, at least for now. Erik was there, too, and he asked me several questions about how I knew his name, what my connection was to Schmidt, and why had I said I knew what he looked like when he was old?

I am not clear as to what I said in reply. I know I thought very carefully about my answers, and I don't believe I gave away the truth. For his part, Erik refuses to tell me.

* * *

><p>The Coast Guard was trying to salvage what they could from the wreck of the <em>Caspartina<em>, as directed by the CIA, which meant Erik Lensherr was temporarily left on his own recognizance as long as he didn't attempt to leave. Not that they would have been able to stop him if he truly wanted to. He had never cared for the 'Keystone Kops' variety of comedy, so instead he went off to check on the mysterious Joon-Yi Song, and found her in the ship's tiny infirmary. She was sitting in a chair, humming to herself and pleating the hem of a blanket between the hooks of her prosthetics.

"I don't suppose I shall ever know," she said aloud. Her left eye had a hard plastic shell taped over it; her right was unfocused and dreamy.

"Don't suppose you shall ever know what?" he asked, taking the other chair.

"Whether or not the paroxetine stopped my powers from developing back when I was thirteen. I mean, maybe I would have had them all along."

"What's paroxetine?" he asked.

"A selective serotonine uptake inhibitor that suppresses anxiety and depression. I was on it for years and years and years. It inhibits and suppressususses other things too. Like codeine. I mean I never had this kind of reaction to codeine before. I'm not feeling any…pain…at….allll."

"I can see that," he replied. "Joon-Yi—."

She interrupted. "It suppresses the sex drive too. I mean intellectually I can understand desire, but otherwise sex seems like making homemade ice cream in one of those really old-fashioned hand-cranked machines, where you have to put ice and salt all around the container. It's so much work and so much cranking and then when it's done you open up the container and find out that the salt leaked in and you wasted all that time and energy and effort, not to mention ingredients. All that anticipation, and then it's just a huge crushing disappointment. Much better just to go to the grocery store and buy a pint of premium."

"I—take it you've tried it, then?" He suppressed a smile.

"Sex or making homemade ice cream?" she asked. "None of your business."

"You're right," he agreed.

"Although if you were to offer to take me out for ice cream sometime I might agree." She tried to focus on him. "I like ice cream. I don't remember us ever having ice cream together, though. When we go out it's for coffee—well, you always get café Americano and I get tea. I don't like coffee. It doesn't taste nearly as good as it smells, but tea tastes even better than it smells."

There was no accountable way she could have known how he took his coffee. Schmidt didn't know; he had not been of an age to drink coffee when the war ended, even if there had been coffee available, which there wasn't. "Are you reading my mind, like Xavier?"

She snorted with laughter. "No. I don't like most people as it is. The last thing I want to do is read their minds or have them read mine."

"Are you sure you don't have me mixed up with someone else?"

"Quite sure."

"Did Schmidt ever tell you about me?" he tried again.

"No. He asked me once if I knew an Erik, but I put him off by talking about the Phantom of the Opera. _His_ name is Erik, too."

He paused so long, thinking over what to ask her next—she was clearly too out of it to lie, but her answers were obscure—that she started to nod off. "How did you learn Sebastian Shaw was Klaus Schmidt?"

"Wha-Oh. Have you been here long?" she asked in return.

"Not long. How did you make the connection between Shaw and Schmidt?"

"Deduction. He also asked if I had ever heard of Dr. Klaus Schmidt, and he speaks with a German accent when he's had a few...tooo...many. There was more to it, but it began there. I wonder if this is what being drunk is like? I mean, I think I'm thinking perfectly clearly, but I don't think the record button is pushed. Are you as good a chess player now as you're going to be?" She regarded him speculatively.

"What?"

She repeated the question.

"I have no way of answering that. How do you know I even play chess?"

"Because we've played together dozsesnes of times...You always win, but if you're still perfecting your game, I think I could take you." She tried to sit up straight, but it was an effort.

"If you know so much about me, then who taught me to play chess?" he challenged her.

"Your grandfather Yakob." That was true.

Time for a change of subject. "How is your eye?" That was what he had come in to ask about, after all.

"Not too bad. I can't fly or go deep-sea diving for a while, and I'm going to have quite a shiner, but the important thing is that I am now doubly prepared for a career in piracy. I have the hooks and the eye patch. Plus I get codeine out of the deal. A little too much codeine at the moment, but I'm riding it out…

"Speaking of mind readers, though," she returned to an earlier topic, "Charles Xavier better get his reactions to other mutants under control or he's not going to get very far as an expert_ or_ an educator. Anyhow, I thought he was in a wheelchair—but I suppose that hasn't happened yet. I hope it won't happen, though. Even if he_ is_ a bit tactless, he seems nice and he is your oldest friend. It's lucky I am a dragon and have the confidence of a dragon, or he might have hurt my self-esteem!" she said, indignant.

That made him laugh, and her smile to see him laugh. His life offered few occasions for laughter. "And you believe you are a dragon?"

"Not literally. It's a metaphor," Her mood changed abruptly. "It wasn't fair, what you did. It wasn't right. Dying like that, and leaving me to deal with everything. Calling Emergency, and you dead there on the floor, with the paramedics taking you away. I don't think you understand how terrible it was. Will be. Was," she corrected herself. "The way I sound, like I need a psychiatrist rather than a physicist, and that's being generous. But it was terrible, and empty, alone there in that apartment, trying to put the pieces together." Her good eye was starting to well up.

"Joon-Yi—you're saying you can see the future—."

"Not exactly. I remember it."

"When does Schmidt die?" he asked.

"November 22, 1962, on a Cuban beach. It's reported as a 'brain embolism.'" she said, "But since Colonel Hendry's fate could be changed, I'd like to take a stab at changing his, too."

"There I could not agree with you more. But—when do I die, and how?"

"You die on February 19th, 2013, of cancer," she replied.

"And you're there when I die?"

"—I'm not_ right_ there. But I found you shortly afterward."

It was mad. He could hardly conceive of living beyond his revenge on Schmidt, much less for more than fifty years past that. Live to be eighty-six? It was mad—and she was sobbing. "Look—don't cry, it wouldn't be good for your eye. I promise I won't do it again, all right?"

"It's partly the codeine," she explained. "Among the side effects are mental or mood changes. I don't think I want to talk anymore."

"Then I'll leave you now. I want to think." He did indeed. Going up on the deck, he looked out over the harbor, where the Coast Guard seemed to be finishing up with the _Caspartina_, whose uppermost deck was the only part still above water. He felt a trifle lightheaded—when had he last eaten? Hours before. Partly it had to be his reaction to seeing Schmidt again, after all these years. Seeing him, coming so close to killing him.

But then there was Joon-Yi, and Charles Xavier. If Joon-Yi were to be believed, if she were sane and accurate, then Xavier and he would be friends. He tried to remember what it was like to have a friend, to be a friend. It wasn't easy. And if Joon-Yi was correct about that, then—then…

They would grow old together. She would be there for him when he died, and after. She would one day—.

One day she would be his widow.

It was the only way it all made sense.

But it was ridiculous, it was insane. He'd been married to Magda, and it had ended as horribly and tragically as everything in his life ended, with screaming and fire and their daughter Anya dead, burned beyond recognition. She had been only four years old.

But Magda had been human, only human. Joon-Yi was a mutant. Fifty years was a lifetime. Spent together? It argued that they might find some degree of comfort and companionship with each other. There might be other children—grandchildren, in the fullness of time, even great-grandchildren.

It was still ridiculous and still insane.

He went back inside. She had fallen asleep in the embrace of the drug, and her good eye fluttered under its lid, caught in some dream. He thought of her as he had first seen her, only an hour before. Only an hour? It seemed longer. She had been perfectly groomed, dressed to the nines. Now her hair had come down and all the make-up was washed away, her eye bruised and bandaged. The salt water had ruined her clothes. It didn't matter. All that was superficial. She was—exquisite. Her forehead was like a child's, but her mouth was full and sensual.

She had been fierce and fearless as she faced Schmidt down with words and fought his people (although she had not been quite as good at the latter). She was intelligent and well educated. Spirited. She had a wry sense of humor. She was prepared to kill if and when it was necessary.

She even seemed to like him.

It might actually work.

Or she might be delusional or a very gifted liar. Possibly even both. Right now he didn't know.

He did make sure the blanket was wrapped around her before he left, and that the bandage was staying in place. She had promised to help him track down and kill Schmidt, and for that she needed to be recovered. After that—was undetermined.

But it was the possibility of a real future, and that was more than he had had for a decade.

* * *

><p>AN: I really hope you don't hate this chapter. Please tell me.


	21. A Kindness of Ravens

When I woke up again, it was to find an extremely pretty and oddly familiar looking blonde girl there. "Oh—hi," I said, blinking the only eye I could.

"Hi," she jumped up. "Charles sent me because the CIA recovered some luggage which they think is yours and he thought you might need a hand—um, that you could maybe use some help. I'm sorry, I didn't say that on purpose. I really didn't."

"It's okay. It's a very common expression. I don't fly off the _hand_le over honest mistakes. Besides, I don't think Mr. Xavier realizes how_ handy_ I actually am." To prove it, I popped the locks on my suitcase and opened it from across the room.

"Oh, wow! You really are a mutant too!" Her face lit up. "This is so cool! First that absolute_ dish_ Erik and now you, and you're a girl! Oh, and I'm Raven, Charles's sister."

Oh, really? Raven as in Raven Darkholme (her married name?) who I had met in Mutant Prison, who had been in with Xavier and Erik from the start? _That _Raven? I scanned her face quickly. Yes, subtract some baby fat, add a few years, brighten the hair a bit… "And I'm Joon-Yi Song. Listen, if you really want to help, I would love a mug of tea."

"Sure, I'll be right back!" She left, and I quickly changed out of my salt-scratchy clothes. What a shame; I'd waited months to have a chance to wear that outfit, and now I would never wear it again. Shantung silk was definitely 'Dry Clean Only'. For that matter, my prosthetics weren't meant for salt water either, and could use a good oiling and maybe some work with a wire brush.

When I got down to my bra, something fell out and bounced across the floor, something hard, small and bright. I retrieved it from under a cabinet, and smiled.

'Small' is one of those relative terms. It was quite a large diamond, if it were real, albeit oddly shaped. I never really cared for diamond jewelry. I mean, they're just overpriced and useless pieces of carbon that happened to have crystallized in a pretty way. Knowing where _this_ one came from, though—. Well, I would have it appraised, set in gold, or maybe in platinum, and wear it with pride and pleasure. As a tribesman in Africa might wear the skin of a lion, a trophy of a foe.

A trophy of a toe, actually. Although the hardest substance on earth, diamond is also very brittle. When Permafrost kicked that steel grating, she broke her foot in a much more literal way than most people. And her pinky toe had wound up going down my top and lodging in my bra.

Setting it aside for a moment, I finished stripping and picked out fresh clothing from my suitcase. Thanks to the sterling efforts of the Coast Guard, I had my big suitcase and my purse back, but my beach bag and smaller case were MIA. Too bad about those, but now I had fresh clothes and much more importantly, shoes.

I was combing out my hair when Raven returned, a steaming mug in hand. "Neat! I mean—this is going to sound kinda, uh, silly, but seeing you move things around like that makes me think of fairy tales with invisible servants waiting on the princess."

"I'm glad you cast me as the princess and not the evil witch," I replied, taking the mug of tea. "Thanks! So—what are your powers?"

"Oh. Um. You've got to promise not to freak out, okay?" She looked not just nervous but spooked, poor kid.

"I promise. Hey, among Shaw's inner circle was a guy named Azazel who looked like the devil incarnate, and he didn't freak me out, so I doubt you will." I sipped my tea and watched.

"Okay—here goes." She turned into me, taped-up eye patch and all, except that I was not currently wearing my prosthetics. She even got my clothes correct in every detail.

"How wonderful! " I exclaimed spontaneously. "Is it just an illusion, or do you physically change?"

"No, I really physically change. If you talk to my brother about how I do it, he'll go on and on for hours about subcutaneous muscle layers and air sacs and how I change colors the way a blue jay's feathers aren't really blue, they just look blue. All I know is I concentrate and it happens." she explained. "I can't change my bones much, which is why I can't look exactly like you. I mean—I have to imitate your artificial arms."

"Well, you have fantastic powers of observation," I said, "because from where I'm sitting, the change looks perfect." I was wondering if her clothes were actually clothes, in that case, or if they were part of her skin. It seemed like a rather personal question to ask, though.

"Thank you," she flushed with pleasure.

"Was it my imagination, though, or did you turn kind of blue around the edges as you transitioned?" I queried, sipping more tea.

"Oh, you noticed that? Um—you have to promise not to freak out double." She was so adorable! Actually, she reminded me of my sister Sara's daughter Meredith. (Being so much older than me, my siblings already had kids, a couple of them teenage.)

"I promise not to freak out _squared_," I replied.

"Okay—this is how I really look." She sounded a little sad, as though she expected a freak out anyway. Then she changed again. She was blue skinned and scaly, with red-hair and yellow eyes.

Mystique.

Raven was Mystique? This sweet kid who reminded me of my niece? _She_ was going to be the hard-edged terrorist and killer, second only to Magneto?

This was just wrong.

She was looking to me for a reaction, though, and I gave her the first one that sprang to mind. "So you're a dragon, too!"

She immediately morphed back into blonde and peach-skinned. "What, because I'm scaly?" She sounded mad and hurt.

"No, because you're a woman of hidden depth and power. That's how I think of myself, secretly. As a hidden dragon." I told her.

"Oh. That's pretty cool." She smiled again. "Hey, you have a lot of swimsuits." I had left them laid out over a chair as I went through my suitcase. She had just now noticed them, and went over to pick one up. "These are really cute!"

"That's part of my adaptation. Not my fashion sense, but swimming. I could give any Olympian two laps and still win—at least if it were a freestyle event."

"That's fantastic! Say—are you really Miss MacTaggart's informant, too?"

"I am," I said.

"Because Charles was going on about how he wanted to talk to you about your theories, and now he's being all quiet." she told me.

"Is he?" Finishing my tea, I found my lipstick in my purse, stretched out my mouth, and applied it. "Well, if that was what he wanted, then he really put his foot in it."

"Oh, no!" she wailed. "He _didn't_—he didn't hit on _you_ too, did he?"

"He was definitely working up to it," I said, squeezing my lips together. "Then he saw my arms."

"OOOOOooooOOOO!" she steamed. "I'm going to _kill_ him." She left the room, then stuck her head back in. "I'm sorry. He has no clue about how to talk to women."

I smiled and repacked my suitcase, but the memory of Raven as she would be, fifty one years hence, disturbed me. My surmise that she was not Mr. Magnussen's daughter or granddaughter, but the 'long term relationship' who he had betrayed had to be correct. No happy ending for this nice young girl. In fifty years time, she would be Mystique the terrorist, bitter, deprived of her powers and imprisoned for the rest of her life. (She would also hardly look a decade older, but I doubt that would be much consolation.)

But then there weren't going to be happy endings for anybody, were there? Raven would be the creature I met in prison. Erik would become Mr. Magnussen, dying alone on his kitchen floor with only me to care. Charles Xavier would end up in a wheelchair, never marrying, never bringing peace to human and mutantkind, dying in some way that meant he was identifiable only by DNA. All this bright promise, come to naught.

Shakespeare's Hamlet sprang to mind.

'Time is out of joint. O cursed spite,'

Good thing I was there to set it right.

However, things were on the move, and shortly thereafter, I found myself in a long black car with Mr. Black, Moira, Xavier, Erik, and Raven. Perhaps so Mr. Black could watch us better, I was the filling in a sandwich consisting of Xavier on one side of me and Erik on the other. This would not have been a problem except that…

Well, I was suddenly very _aware_ of them both, if you take my meaning. No physical contact was going on, but that didn't seem to matter. Maybe it was swimming together that did it. Maybe it was pheromones. Whatever it was, I was consumed with lust. It was a very inconvenient time for my sexuality to wake up and decide it was time for some action. Grabbing either of them and ravishing them right then and right there was out of the question, alas. It probably wouldn't be a good idea either. (Not yet, anyway.) At least my body wasn't showing this the way a guy's would. It was a tremendous distraction at a time when I wanted most to be focused and coherent.

"I understand how you made the connection between Shaw and Schmidt," Black said, "but how were you able to gather so much background information on Schmidt from Nevada, without ever visiting Germany?"

"I joined a genealogical society under the name of Anna Nicole Schmidt, saying I was trying to trace my late grandfather, Klaus or Nicklaus Schmidt. Yes, they were informal and amateurs, but 'amateur' means someone who does something purely out of love for it. I used blind mail drops to cover the trail of where the information was going." This was my turn to be questioned, as Erik had his turn while I napped off the codeine.

It all went along rather well until the end, when I finished up with, "—I don't know who Shaw's Soviet contacts are, but I'm sure there is someone in their hierarchy whose sense and loyalties could be worked on as he worked on Colonel Hendry."

And then Charles Xavier cheerfully added this bit of reassurance. "But there's no cause for alarm, because World War Three isn't going to happen. You've seen that it won't happen, correct?"

"You can see the future?" Mr. Black asked.

"Stop the car, please." I pleaded.

"What? Why?" the CIA man asked.

"Because I think I'm going to be sick," I informed him, and it was not much of an exaggeration.

That got the car pulled over quite hastily. Nobody wanted me to be sick in there with them. Xavier got out so I could get out, and then I took off running.

It was pure monkey-brain flight response. We were driving through Georgia at that point, so the road was hedged on both sides with peanut fields, but on our side there was a orchard of peaches, and I wanted the cover of the trees.

"Joon-Yi? Wait—what's wrong?" It was Xavier, and unfortunately this was land and not water. He was several inches taller than I and he didn't have an eye that hurt afresh with every single bounce, so he caught up to me before I was halfway there.

"Why are you running away?" he asked, grabbing my shoulder and tugging me to a halt.

"Let go of me before I cause you extreme testicular pain!" I backed that up with a tweak to his scrotum, and he dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. "Did you ever stop and wonder why I didn't come forward when Moira wanted proof? It's because right now the US is doing things we pretend only other countries do." I told him.

"What do you mean? What are they doing?" he asked.

"Right now, in this state and several others, panels of middle age, middle class white men are deciding who should be sterilized because they are unfit to have children." I said. "It's because right now, the Institute of Health, the _National Institute of Health_, is continuing the Tuskegee Experiment, where they track the development of syphilis in poor black men, denying them access to the only sure cure, penicillin. They suffer and die and so do their infected wives and their children. That is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention and a hideous wrong. Yet it will continue for over a decade more. (Except now that I had remembered it, I was going to do something about it.)

"I don't want to wind up on a lab table having my ovaries cut out, thank you, and I don't want to wind up in a windowless cell for the rest of my life because I'm too valuable to be allowed to run around loose!"

Erik had followed Xavier, and come up right about the time I was threatening to rip Charles's balls off.

"I'm sure they wouldn't—." Xavier began. "There has to be some mistake or misunderstanding—."

"Does there?" Erik asked. "Why should the United States be so different from every other country? I've been through it. Have you?" he asked the other man.

"Of course not! But what could you know that they'd have to keep you jugged up?" he turned to me.

"What could I know? What about this: President Kennedy will be assassinated next year in Dallas, Texas by a man named Lee Harvey Oswald. November 23, 1963, one year and one day after the Cuban Missile Crisis. His brother Bobby Kennedy will be assassinated—."

"Ssssh!" Xavier put his hand over my mouth, but took it away when I tweaked his privates again. "Don't talk like that! Of course they have to know, but—."

"But what? I was planning on dropping that information through Moira, a bit at a time from an undisclosed location of _my _choosing, but I consider that my responsibility ends when my rights end. I refuse to enter any government compound, facility or building with them knowing I know what's going to happen." I fumed at him.

"But you can't just walk off like this!" Xavier tried reasoning. Turning to Erik, he said, "You tell her. Perhaps she'll listen to you."

"Tell her what?" Erik asked with sardonic humor. "I'm here because she forgot her suitcase." He hefted my one remaining case.

"Oh. Thank you," I reached out for it, but he didn't let go.

"I might as well carry it. So where are we going?" he asked.

"We?" That was Xavier and I speaking in unison.

"Yes. You made me a promise concerning Schmidt," he said to me, "I intend to hold you to that, and I can hardly do that if you disappear." To Charles he said, "As she seems to have found out more than you and the entire CIA combined, you'll excuse me if I place my confidence where it's merited."

"You can't mean to say you're just—leaving? Just like that?" Xavier was nonplussed.

"What's wrong?" Raven had come up upon us, and was looking from one face to another in the dim light. Her shoes were not suitable for running through peanut fields after dark, which was what had taken her so long. "Why'd you all run off like that?"

"It's because your brother needs to learn how to keep other people's secrets, that's why." I snarled at him. "I am not going to continue on with them knowing that I have any knowledge of the future. What's more, since World War Three won't be taking place, and what happens instead is that mutantkind gets introduced to the world as something to be feared and hated, why do you think they would want to get involved? Where's the stake in it for them?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't think—." he began.

"That much is obvious," Erik remarked.

"But Charles can make them forget!" Raven seized on that. "He can. He can make them forget all about it. Then it'll be all right, and you can stay, right?"

"It's up to her," Erik indicated me.

"Please? I'm sorry, but—I've never had a friend. Not one who was a girl, I mean. Not somebody who knew and liked me anyway. And maybe it's selfish, but—please?" she begged.

"I—." I was tired, the codeine had worn off and my eye ached again, all the more so for the run across the field. Where was I going to go, anyhow? Especially with Erik following me, which I wasn't too sure about, anyway. "The moment I suspect I'm not free to go, I'm out of there. Wherever there is."

"Oh, thank you! Charles, _do it_."

"Raven, you know I don't like doing that kind of thing—."

"Oh, right." she retorted. "You only don't like doing it when it isn't _your_ idea! Because you _did_ do it to Mr. Black just the other day to get us out of—."

"All right, all right," he turned. Moira, Mr. Black and the driver were on their way towards us. When Xavier put his fingers to his temples, they stopped. He started stomping back toward the car in a huff, and we followed.

"I better talk to him," Raven said, and hurried to catch up. "Meet you back at the car!"

So Erik and I were left to pick our way out among the legumes. He was still carrying my suitcase, a gesture I appreciated. "Joon-Yi—," he began.

"Yes?"

"Are you normally this forthright all the time?" he asked.

"Am I normally this much of a bitch, do you mean? No, this is atypical. It's been a rough night, that's all." I told him.

We made it back to the car without turning an ankle or getting a gun pointed at us by an irate peanut farmer, and although the mindwiping made Moira and Mr. Black kind of spacy for a little while, it wore off.

Yet—I really can't afford to get too attached to Erik. Or to Raven. Because if stopping Shaw doesn't work, if things go down badly in Cuba—then they are the greatest threats to the future of mutantkind.

If I am prepared to kill a man (and I am) because of what his actions mean for the future, then I have to be prepared to eliminate those who continue and escalate the cycle of hatred.

I can't spare them because one is spunky and reminds me of the niece I love. Or because the other is handsome and will one day become my good friend.

So I dare not get too attached to them.

I have to remember that.

* * *

><p>AN: Well, another longish chapter! Penguin Snuggles, you will never hear me or any other ficcer complain because you review every chapter. Never. There were indeed involuntary sterilizations of those deemed unfit to breed, and some of the reasons were extremely specious. The Tuskegee Experiment is quite famous and one of the worst and most shameful episodes in American history.


	22. Small Triumphs

The sign in the diner window read: No Coloreds, No Dogs.

"Couldn't they find the space to add 'No Jews' as well?" Erik asked, savage and biting.

"I think circumcision is a common enough practice in American hospitals now that checking would be unreliable," Joon-Yi said, quite clinically detached, as if she were not talking about male genitalia at all. "The question is, is there anywhere else in this town-it's even not a one horse town, it's at best _half_ a horse-to have breakfast? One that doesn't have a similar sign, of course."

"Short of knocking on someone's door and asking them to feed us, no," Xavier said, returning from the motel office. The drive from Florida all the way to Virginia was far too long not to stop for the night, and they had ended up in a town that Erik had privately likened to a pimple on the backside of America. It might have been in Georgia. It might have been in South Carolina. Wherever it was, Jim Crow was still alive and well.

"If I were on my own, I'd ask them for a fried egg sandwich to go, then off somewhere and eat it," Joon-Yi commented. "I don't want a conflict, I just want breakfast. Anyhow, it all depends on whether they consider Asians to be colored or white. It could easily go either way."

"Well if they won't serve you, then I'm not eating there either. " Raven said. "_Colored_. I could show _them_ a thing or two about being colored."

"Yes, but you're not going to," Xavier said. "I have a solution. We can all go in, and I'll make sure no one notices Joon-Yi is different at all."

"I think you're missing the point," Erik told him.

"I'm not missing anything!" Xavier exploded. "It's just that you have to pick your battles. Either we can cause a fuss over civil rights or we can have breakfast. We can't have both. Not today."

"Or I could wad the diner and all its occupants up into a ball," Erik commented. The diner had metal paneling on its exterior, and it would not be difficult.

"But that would cause repercussions and difficulties, made all the worse by the lack of breakfast," Joon-Yi contributed. "And I don't want a conflict, bloody or civil. It's far too early in the morning."

"We could maybe wait and get something in the next town," Raven suggested. "Unless they're segregated too."

At that point, Mr. Black came out of his motel room and inquired, "Is something wrong?"

Joon-Yi explained as briefly as possible, leaving out the death threat, the mind control, and Raven's plan to show the town exactly how colorful someone could be.

"I agree that it's offensive," Mr. Black said, nodding, "but it won't be a problem. There's something you haven't taken into consideration: majority rules. You won't be going in on your own, you'll be going in with six people, including Moira, Henson and me." Henson was the CIA driver and also white. "Since you're part of this group of white people, by default you must be white too. I suggest we keep to noncontroversial subjects over the meal, though. Come on."

He was correct. The waitress even exclaimed maternally over Joon-Yi's eye patch, "Oh, the poor little thing! Whatever happened to her?"

"We were at a picnic yesterday, ma'am," Joon-Yi replied, as if she had been spoken to and not over, "and I got in the way of a softball. Could I have waffles, juice and hot tea, please?" Well, she could hardly say that she had been punched by a supervillainess bent on global devastation, could she?

"—You sure can, hon. What can I get the rest of y'all?"

Erik began to relax, only to come into conflict with the waitress when she got around to him. "No. No bacon, no ham, no sausage. Just two fried eggs with the yolks still soft—."

"We call that 'over easy' here, hun—."

"You can call it what you will as long as that's what I get—toast, potatoes, and coffee." He was out of the habit of eating with other people, of making conversation. When he dined, it was alone and in silence, without argumentative waitresses hovering around.

"But ordering allah carty like that is ten cents more. If'n you get bacon, ham or sausage, it's our number three special and that's only a quarter."

"I don't _want_ any ham, bacon or sausage. What about that is so difficult to grasp?" He had never kept kosher on his own; that belonged to the kingdom of childhood, when Mama's kitchen was full of good smells and strict rules to be learned. He could enjoy a rare steak and partake of shellfish, yet he still did not eat pork when there was any other alternative to starvation, and cream sauces on meat made him gag. Some things, it seemed, went clear to the bone.

"You know, Raven loves bacon," Xavier put in, forestalling an angry rejoinder from their server. "If you don't want it, I'm sure she'll be happy to take it off your hands."

Accepting the solution, Erik nodded. "Then I'll have the bacon on a separate plate. If that's acceptable."

It was, although he'd earned a dirty look or two as the woman passed. How did people do this all the time?

"Raven, would you mind switching seats with me?" Joon-Yi asked. "I would rather face the wall than the room. I hate people staring at me when I eat and I loathe being pitied because of the prostheses. It makes me want to snarl and bite."

He could empathize with that completely.

Raven agreed, "Well, if you're that hungry, I guess I better before you bite _me_!" and the two swapped places.

Admiring them as they crossed behind him, he could not help but compare and contrast the difference between Raven's natural coloring and the insipid palette of the persona she showed to the world. With rough-faceted lapis skin, carnelian hair, and golden eyes, she was breathtaking, a uniquely and truly mutant beauty. As she was now, blue eyed, smooth-skinned tan, and blonde, she was simply a conventionally pretty girl, like any disposable ingénue or starlet, although every feature was the same in every other way.

Joon-Yi, on the other hand, although human in every apparent aspect but her arms, had finer features, a more delicate bone structure. Ironic because Raven could copy any bone structure, it was nevertheless true. Her shiny black hair was as straight as hair could be, three qualities he associated with Asian hair, and her skin was the warm shade of golden sugar, a comparison sparked by a vague memory of Mama making strudel toppings for baked fruit—Obviously he was hungrier than he realized.

"How is your eye?" he asked her, relieved to have thought of something he could talk about.

"Livid," she replied, cheerfully. "I'm ready to star in a horror movie. Get those cameras rolling!"

Xavier laughed and started an imaginary camera rolling—what a fortunate man, to be able to so joke around! "And what monster is after you, Miss Song?"

"After _me_, nothing! I'm the one doing the haunting—what's your favorite spooky movie, everyone? Or favorite actor or character?" She looked around the table. "Moira, you first!"

"Me—oh, Dracula," she laughed, a touch self-conscious. "I always go for the vampires, they're so sexy and dangerous."

"Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, though?" Joon-Yi asked.

"Christopher Lee, of course!" the CIA agent said. "He's so tall and icy and…aristocratic."

"Mr. Black?"

"King Kong," he replied. "You know that moment when he reaches out and snags the airplane? That is the best moment in the whole picture. Just for that second, you believe he might win."

"Oh, I agree completely. You know, I've read the producers didn't get why people all cheered for Kong then? They didn't understand that in movies like that the audience is on the monster's side." Joon-Yi nodded.

"Well of course they'd be on Kong's side. He's the hero. I mean, the movie's named for him," Xavier said. "I always liked—well, my favorite was The Werewolf of London."

"Oh! Oh, oh! Where the werewolf stops to put on his coat and hat before he goes out on the rampage! I love that, it's so…British." Joon-Yi replied.

"Well, I'm half British, so perhaps that explains it," Xavier said. "What about you, Raven?"

"Lon Chaney, the Man of A Thousand Faces," she said, flat and sour.

"Raven, if you can't join in, you should at least be nice—." her brother chided her.

"No, no. Lon Chaney senior is an _excellent_ choice," Joon-Yi interrupted. "I have greater respect for him than for any other actor in the genre. I mean, he did all his own make-up, even the most elaborate monster make-ups. He created his characters from the ground up. Genius doesn't have to be book-smart. It can be visual or musical or…anything. Erik, what about you?"

"Frankenstein," he replied. "The monster, not the scientist, before you ask, and the first two Karloff movies, no others."

"A classicist," she nodded. "Nobody ever likes the scientist. There's nothing_ to_ like. It's the monster's suffering people identify with. We all see ourselves in him, in groping to connect with the world and with people."

"Yes!" Erik said, glad to be able to add to the discussion. He could do this. He could talk about movies. It was a start. "He wants what everyone wants—a home, friends, a wife—but because he was not made like other people, he can only destroy anything he touches. All that is possible for him is revenge and oblivion."

"Oh, but the Christopher Lee version has a lot going for it," Moira put in, distracting him. "He's the only one where you believe he was really put together from corpses."

"I haven't seen that one," Erik said. "I haven't been to a new movie in a theater for seven years."

"Oh, but that's such a long time," Xavier said, "What movie did you see?"

"1955?" Joon-Yi looked reflective for a moment, and then rather—sad? "Don't tell me. Let me guess. This Island Earth, starring Rex Reason and Faith Domergue."

"Yes," he said, startled. "—but how did you know?"

She glanced from Xavier to Raven and back to him again, and then all four said in unison, "Mute-Ant!" and the table dissolved in laughter. And he, even he, joined in.

The meal arrived, and they ate. Movies, it seemed, were a big enough and universal enough subject that it could carry them through a whole meal.

"Joon-Yi, you've sure seen a lot of horror movies," Raven commented. "I mean, it seems like you've seen everything anybody even mentioned."

"Not—_everything_," The Asian girl was suddenly self-conscious. "But horror movies are pure escapism, and—well, when you're watching a movie, for a couple of hours the world is a different place. There's been a lot of times in the past when I needed the world to be a different place."

"You may have seen a lot of movies," Erik challenged her. "but I know one you can't have seen. It's horrifying but it's not exactly a horror movie; the monsters in it are entirely human. It's German, pre-War. Peter Lorre starred in it before he went to Hollywood, and it's simply called—."

"M," she nodded. "Yes, I've seen that too. He plays a child molester and murderer."

"No," he protested. "You can't have. Here, in America? It's old and obscure—it was made in 1931, and I only saw it because my cousin Bertilde was supposed to be watching me, but she wanted to see her boyfriend so she took me along to the movie—I had nightmares afterward. Here, what tune does 'M' whistle? And what's his name?"

"His name is Hans Beckert, and the tune is 'In the Hall Of The Mountain King'," she replied. "Yes, I really did see it. There are art house theaters and revival theaters in lots of cities now."

"All right, that you might have learned from a book on film. But what was the moment that most moved you? You can't fake _that_."

"When the mother is setting the table for her daughter's lunch," Joon-Yi responded, immediately. "The way she polishes the silverware so carefully and ladles the soup into that covered bowl—every movement tells how much she loves that child, and all the while—." She ended with a half sob, reached for a clean napkin. "Now look what you've done."

"Speaking of done," Mr. Black said, a little too loudly, "I think we're done with breakfast, and we do need to be on the road again. I might add that there is a screening room at my facility, and although it's there for official purposes, people have been known to run films afterhours from time to time." Tossing down a five dollar bill, he got up from the table.

They followed, but Erik fell into step behind Joon-Yi as they went down the aisle and out the front door. "Can you stay there and be as wide as you can for just a second?" she murmured, pausing.

"Yes," he said, wondering why. "You know, you never said what your favorite horror movie was. Or have you seen too many to have a favorite?"

"Oh, I have a favorite, but it really is totally unknown in the rest of the world. It's a Korean film called, in English, A Tale of Two Sisters. It's based on a folktale—I…" She faltered, and he saw that her good eye had gone shiny and wet again.

"It works you up that much?" he asked.

"No. I was remembering the last person I told about it. He's dead now, and I miss him terribly."

"Who was he?" he demanded, feeling a jab of jealous feeling.

"An old friend. Literally. He was like a grandfather to me—we used to play chess together, in fact."

Her grandfather's age, and dead—hardly a rival, then. "Then you'll come to miss him less and less. That's the nature of loss and grief."

"I know," she answered. "And in truth, I already miss him much less than I did even…yesterday."

"Good," he said casting a glance over his shoulder at the diner. "You know, I was so caught up in our conversation, I forgot to be angry about the sign—. It's gone!"

"I know. It's under my jacket. That's why I told you to be as wide as you could. I stole it." She flashed an impish, conspiratorial grin at him. "Of course they'll put another one up, but you have to be able to get happy even about the smallest triumphs."

"Yes," he said. "You do."

* * *

><p>AN: Yeah, I really love old movies and I put that in this chapter. It's hard to imagine what it was like before DVDs and streaming when movies only came on TV after several years and were rarely reshown, but that's what it would have been like in First Class's time. Having a subscription to Netflix makes her seem like a film expert. Joon-Yi and Mr. Magnussen discussed This Island Earth back in chapter 2 and A Tale of Two Sisters back in chapter 6, which is how she can guess what movie he saw in 1955. And she's thinking of the older him when she gets teary about Tale, ironically.

Many many thanks to Aislynn and Supermoshiiball for their reviews. Regarding the relative lack of reviews, well, it's frustrating when a four chapter fic where Erik and Charles announce their relationship on Facebook gets 178 reviews, and I get 80 for twenty chapters, but hey. I figure my readers know what they like too.

I'm behind on replies, as ever, and I apologize.


	23. That's My Story, And I'm Sticking To It

It was strange relating to Erik, knowing Mr. Magnussen as well as I did. It was like…you know, I'm trying to come up with a good metaphor here and my imagination is failing me. I've tried thinking out a 'town where you grew up' scenario, and one involving shoes that just sounded stupid, and 'It was strange' is the best I can come up with, and it is lame, lame, lame. I know him and I don't know him at the same time. I find myself wondering: Has he been married yet? Where is his wife/future wife now? Or where is she buried, if she is dead? What about his children? (One need not have a wife in order to have children, after all, even in 1962) How many, if any, have been born? How will I keep myself from revealing I know more about him than I should?

The last is the most cogent question.

Anyhow, after breakfast in the KKK Diner (not its real name), we all got back in the car with everyone in the same seats as last night. And with my libido still screaming, 'Come on, already! You've got maybe another twenty years of healthy fertility, so pick one of them and get started!' Maybe it_ is_ pheromones emitted by certain male mutants. I didn't like Riptide's body odor, Azazel's teleportation smoke smelled like sulphur, and nothing could have fought its way through Shaw's cologne, so that's why I wasn't attracted to any of them. Maybe if I put some menthol rub under my nose my body will settle down…

Mr. Black, who really is a decent sort, opened things by saying, "Now, I don't think it will come as a surprise to any of you to learn that Moira and I spent some time last night on the phone, having inquiries made concerning Miss Song and Mr. Lensherr. So far, we've gotten back enough of a sketch on each of you to be able to fill in some details.

"To begin with, Mr. Lensherr applied for and received Israeli citizenship eight and a half years ago, with all the proper documentation. He is traveling on an Israeli passport, and he's here on a tourist visa. Everything could not be more in order.

"However, if one traces back where he's been over the last five years… Interpol has him down on a list of 'Persons of Interest' because there is a string of unsolved murders and mysterious disappearances on his heels. All of them—twenty-eight deaths and seven people gone missing—were German expatriates whose war records do not bear close examination." Mr. Badass Erik 'Bond, James Bond' Lensherr nodded, acknowledging it, but the quirk of his eyebrow and lips said as clear as words: _'They only __found__ thirty-five.'_

"In short, Mr. Lensherr, you have been tracking down and killing Nazi war criminals. You have no connection with Israeli Intelligence; you answer to no one but yourself. You are a free agent and a very dangerous man. Nevertheless, I will be glad to work with you."

He looked over to me. "Miss Song—your story is a sieve that leaks water as fast as you can pour it in. No, don't look like that! You're not in any danger here and nobody is angry at you. I understand why you've been lying and given the circumstances, nobody could blame you."

"What have you found out?" I asked, forcing myself to relax. Whatever they thought they knew, it could hardly be the truth. The only question was, how wrong were they and in what way? I had rather been expecting a confrontation over this issue, and hoping that perhaps some miracle would occur to get me through the rough spots. _Get me out of this one, God, and I will get myself out of the next three on my own. I promise_.

"First, you are not an American citizen; you have no passport, no birth certificate, and all of your ID was purchased from a forger who works for the Vegas Mob ten months ago. The Social Security number you've been using is genuine, but it hasn't been issued to anyone as yet—nice touch, though. However, if I had not known for certain you were an undocumented alien, believe me, you would have passed on every front. Your pronunciation is faultless, your cultural submersion—you're good. _Very_ good. What you are, is Korean by birth, but North Korean, not South.

"You entered the country ten months ago hiding among a group of young women and girls smuggled in by the Korean Mob with the promise of good jobs and American citizenship—once their debts had been worked off in massage parlors and illegal brothels. We know that you and they were locked into an empty shipping container in the hold of a ship called the _Joseon._ We know you escaped from them before you ever got to your destination, and we know how."

"What?" I asked. "I mean—that isn't, you can't—."

"We do, though. The _Joseon_ was stopped and boarded by Port Authority inspectors before it reached San Francisco, and several of the survivors remember the girl who turned out to speak English—they deliberately chose girls who don't speak English, it helps keep them isolated and subjugated—and who was thrown overboard before she could cause any more trouble. She had a deformed limb, they were also specific about that, although I think something was lost in translation there. For you, being thrown overboard would be like, well, like Brer Rabbit being thrown in the briar patch, wouldn't it? Exactly the best thing for you."

"Yes, it would, if it happened, _but it didn't_," Were they making this up to entrap me? Certainly human trafficking of that kind still went on in 2013, but was it possible some poor girl with a clubfoot or something like that _had_ been in such a shipment, and been murdered like that at about the same time that I made the time jump?

I guess my emotional agitation only served to convince them they were right, because—.

"It really is all right," Xavier said, smiling at me. "They're going to grant you asylum as a defector, not deport you."

"Moira?" I appealed to her. "You don't believe this, do you?"

"Joon-Yi, I helped put the pieces together. I knew from when you first gave me all that information that you weren't an amateur. You had to be professional intelligence, and you didn't have handlers or backing. That made you a runaway. The question was, from whom."

"We don't know a lot about North Korea's intelligence program—," Mr. Black began.

"Neither do I! Erik?—Raven? Are you buying this too?"

"It does explain a great deal," Erik replied without actually saying yes. "It was under discussion last night when you were under the codeine. There are a lot of small clues in how you speak and act that add up in support of it.

"Partly it's your use of language—particularly your casual use of cursing. Speaking as someone else for whom English is not a first language, I can say that although I know what words are 'bad', they don't have the same sting to them as those in my native tongue. And then you said your favorite horror movie was Korean and completely unknown to the rest of the world. Where, then, did you see it?"

I could not answer that. I could not tell the truth, which was, 'On my computer at home.' And in 2013, _everybody_ was desensitized to curse words.

But then I realized I didn't have to. Yes, they collectively had hold of the wrong end of the stick, but this was _in my favor_.

_Thank you, Big Guy_! I silently told God, if He or anyone else was listening. "I can't admit to any of this," I said with great care. "I truly cannot, for a lot of reasons. In fact, I deny it. I can't disprove your theory, and I can't prove my story. But I deny every word."

"Understood completely," Mr. Black said.

* * *

><p>AN: A quickie. The next one will be longer.


	24. At First Sight

Unless Erik was quite mistaken, there was enough scheiss in the CIA's 'discoveries' to manure a good sized farm. _All right, Charles, I know you can hear me ,and I know you know what they're thinking_, he thought as loudly as he could, if thoughts could be said to have volume at all, _They cannot possibly believe all that farrago they're spouting unless they're a great deal dimmer than I gave them credit for. One only has to see Joon-Yi smile to know she didn't grow up in a communist country or an impoverished one. Her teeth are too good_.

She did have pretty teeth—white, straight and even, nearly perfect, except that the two top right incisors were implants, porcelain bonded to titanium steel, anchored in her jaw with titanium steel screws. That was the only way he could tell they were artificial. They were a work of art, and art of that sort was expensive. _Taken with the excellent condition of the rest of her teeth, that means she grew up in a first-world country under fairly affluent circumstances. That means America, since she obviously grew up speaking English. Dentistry in England is notoriously poor_.

**They only believe about half of it, the part about the _Joseon_. They don't believe she's North Korean intelligence. But they do think she's undocumented for a reason…** Xavier let the thought trail off.

_And that reason is? _

**That her last name would have given the game away to Shaw.**

_What's so revelatory about 'Song'?_

**They think her _real _last name, her _married_ name, is actually Lensherr.**

_They think we're already married? We only met last night!_

**You two aren't interacting like two people who only met last night. Married people have a way of communicating non-verbally that's practically telepathy in and of itself….why do you say 'already'?**

He tried to think of what had been so 'married' about how they interacted, and couldn't identify anything. They had exchanged some meaningful glances a few times, but….unless someone had seen him wrap the blanket around her. That might have done it.

_Have you let her in on this as yet?_ , he asked, avoiding the question.

**No. I can't. Unless I'm inside her energy field, as we were last night in the air bubble, I can't read her mind or speak to her. It's like trying to tune into a radio station with a lot of static, I only get occasional phrases.**

_I look forward to her reaction. It should be quite memorable_.

He glanced at her. Today she wore robin's egg blue, with a print scarf, monarch butterflies on the same blue, knotted at her throat. Eye-catching, especially since both Raven and the MacTaggart woman wore unrelieved black. The fabric of her blouse clung to her, as knits tended to, showing her slender figure. Her breasts were small, but in proportion to her build. He knew from having picked her up and held her for a moment before dropping her overboard, that they were firm but yielding. Better small and firm than large and flabby, which killed desire in him more effectively than a cold shower. What would it be like to kiss, first that full, inviting mouth, then that arum lily neck, then down to—.

**Excuse me, I'm not trying to tell you what to think, but under the circumstances, perhaps…?**

_Of course. I apologize_. He shelved his erotic musings for another time and greater privacy. Why should he not think of her? She would be his wife, and if he could not desire her, that would be a very ill thing indeed.

* * *

><p>"Welcome to my facility." said their…host? Jailor? Sponsor? What precise role would this rotund human play in their lives?<p>

They had reached Mr. Black's covert base, and pulled up in front of the main building, where they got out of the car and stretched. The laboratories were housed in a modern structure that looked like nothing so much as a number of concrete and glass boxes piled haphazardly atop and beside each other, but it had steel rebar and girders to hold it together. The same rebar and girders could also tear it apart, if needs must, given the application of enough magnetism.

"My mission," Black continued, "has been to research and investigate the application of paranormal powers to military defense."

"Or offense," Erik remarked to Xavier and Joon-yi as they approached the building.

"This guy Shaw, or Schmidt, whatever you want to call him," Black continued. "He's working with the Russians. We might need your help to stop him."

"Marvelous," Xavier said, all sincere boyish enthusiasm, "So we're to be the CIA's new Mutant division, yes?"

"…Something like that," Black said, and led them inside.

The largest laboratory was home not only to a lab but to a scale model of an aircraft with the grace and beauty of something that had life and breath. It was also apparently home to a gawky young scientist who was made even more awkward by the presence of three attractive women in his sanctum sanctorum. A weedy young colt not yet grown into his limbs, his joints seemed held together with rubber, yet he moved as if his shoes pinched his feet slightly.

"It's, uh, a supersonic, the most advanced plane ever built. I wish you could see it in real life." he explained. "It's incredible."

"Hank," Mr. Black said, gesturing toward their group, "these are the special new recruits I was telling you about." Turning toward them, he reciprocated. "I'd like you to meet Hank McCoy, one of our most talented young researchers."

"How wonderful." Xavier strode forward to offer McCoy a hearty hand shake. "You didn't tell-Ah!" Xavier broke off his sentence with a start, his hand going to the back of his head as if, for example, an invisible hand had cuffed him. "As I was saying, it's wonderful that—uh." Puzzled, he looked around. "Joon-Yi, is that you doing this?"

"I thought this was an excellent time to remind you of those _peanut fields_ we were driving through last night, and what was said," she chimed, brightly, but her smile somehow suggested that piano wire was going to put in an appearance and be put to a use for which it was not intended.

"I don't quite understand what you mean, I'm afraid," Xavier frowned. Erik, on the other hand, understood immediately. The young scientist was also a mutant, and Xavier was about to be indiscreet, having learned nothing the night before.

Frustrated, Joon-Yi looked to Erik, who read in it (more married non-verbal communication? Had he ever read Magda so accurately?) '_Please, please tell this idiot to stop blurting out other people's secrets! Or I will be forced to hit him with a chair!',_ which Erik swiftly passed along to the telepath. He did look appropriately contrite, and nearly compounded the damage by apologizing, but at that moment, Hank and Raven caught sight of each other.

It was a moment that deserved a lush pavane played by musicians in costume, with marble halls and polished hardwood floors and maybe a tapestry or two. A flock of pure white doves should have been released on cue, but real life does not come with a genius director to auteur important scenes into the most aesthetic possible shape.

"Um, and Hank is…" Mr. Black trailed off. "Hm. Well, this is awkward. Do you think we should leave the room? I could spare three minutes."

"Let's not," Joon-Yi said, sotto voce, retreating away from the pair, the other members of their group following her. "I've never actually watched two people fall in love at first sight before. It really does happen. I never believed it. That's the primate mating stare, the first stage of bonding. You can practically see the endorphins and oxytocin shimmering around them in the air. Look, in a moment she's going to play with her hair and look away and down so her neck is exposed!"

She sounded like an animal behaviorist might after months of field observation. And yes, in the next moment, Raven did reach up to twiddle the ends of her hair, and demurely looked down at something to the right.

"That's my sister!" Charles protested, and his voice cracked a little when he said it. "Raven!"

The mutant girl glanced over at him, made a face, and went back to talking to Hank.

"Don't worry," Mr. Black soothed. "Dr. McCoy is a fine and upstanding young man with a brilliant future ahead of him, and—ah, well, considering your sister's mutation, maybe nothing will come of it."

"Considering her mutation?" Joon-Yi scoffed. "How many nights has he lain awake wishing that some reasonably attractive girl would see past the glasses, the dreadful clothes, and his general geekieness to like_ him_ for who _he_ is? If he fouls this up, he deserves to die a virgin."

"Agreed," Erik said. Privately he was wondering how experienced Xavier was himself. From what Joon-Yi had said the night before while half-drugged, he concluded that while technically she might not be a virgin, whatever she had done had not amounted to much. Some patience, tenderness and perhaps also a new electric ice cream maker would solve _that_.

"Excuse me!" Charles Xavier spluttered. "We are talking about my sister, my_ little_ sister here!"

"She_ doesn't_ deserve to die a virgin. Look, she and I had a long talk last night, and I think you and I are going to have to do the same, and soon. You're two years younger than I am, by the way." Joon-Yi glanced over at him.

"What has that to do with anything—wait, you're twenty-eight?" Xavier looked at her in surprise. "I thought you were twenty-one, like Raven."

"I get that a lot. In addition to being older than you, I too have a PhD. My bachelor's is in biochemistry and my doctorate is in pharmacology. What's more, I've even worked for a living. That makes me more of a grown up than you. Plus, I, like Raven, am a woman. A woman who also had a older brother by adoption, so I know where I'm coming from here. Butt out and let whatever might happen between them happen. Er—you _have_ had The Talk with her, right?"

"' The Talk,'?" Erik asked. Against all expectations, he was enjoying himself. Although not brought up in America, he could easily guess at what 'The Talk' would be about.

"I don't want to talk about it!" Xavier said.

"Well if somebody doesn't impart a few accurate facts, she could end up in some serious trouble, and not just the classic 'in trouble'." Joon-Yi predicted.

"I cannot believe—," Xavier began, rubbing his hand over his reddening face. "Well, at least he's a mutant too and maybe that will make it all right."

Joon-Yi immediately kicked him in the ankle, but it was too late.

* * *

><p>AN: As mentioned in earlier chapters, Joon-Yi's father is not only a dentist, but a very good one, and he would have emphasised the importance of good dental hygiene in his house. Also, it erodes patient confidence if a dentist's own family doesn't have good teeth.


	25. Getting To Know All About You

Left alone for a moment, Charles Xavier rolled down his sock to take a look, and sighed. Joon-Yi favored platform shoes, no doubt because otherwise she stood five foot nothing. Whatever those soles were made of, they were_ hard_. She had left a mark.

He suspected that would prove true in many ways. And yes, he had been indiscreet, and he had blurted out that Hank was a mutant. Fortunately, Hank had taken his 'outing' well and admitted to Mr. Black that he had been keeping it a secret. Xavier suspected a lot of his willingness was due to the fact that Raven was watching him as if he were the sun in her sky. Peeling off his shoes and socks, he demonstrated that he had feet more like one of the _Ponginae_ subfamily of hominidae apes than those of _Homo Sapiens_, which was impressive, but not nearly as much as his intelligence.

Which Raven apparently worshipped. Yes, he, Xavier, had said too much, but at a moment when he was feeling as though his world had been pulled out from under him, because he too knew the signs and signals of attraction (yes, _sexual_ attraction, may as well admit it) and the idea of, of Raven… Had he taken it for granted that no one would ever want Raven, that she would just be there forever and nothing would change? Even if Hank McCoy turned out not to be able to stomach the idea of…intimacy with her, both Erik and Joon-Yi seemed to think somebody would. And should.

He was not comfortable with the notion, but if it were going to happen, certainly Raven ought to be married first.

The first two other mutants they had ever met, and they had to be Erik Lensherr, who not only took Raven's mutation in stride but admired her for it, and Joon-Yi Song, who simply was trouble…

He stopped himself. What _had_ Raven told her about him last night? For that matter, what could Raven have to complain about concerning him? He gave her everything she wanted, he always had, and the only time that yes, a older woman who could explain matters to her would have helped a lot, was when Raven had gotten her menses for the first time. He would long remember the nightmare of _that_ day, and it was ten years ago, nearly.

There really was no way around it. He was going to have to talk to Joon-Yi, in private, and it couldn't wait. He did not relish the idea, but he couldn't see any way around it, not if they were to become any sort of group and work together.

He got turned around inside the complex, and had to read a map before he found the correct medical area (not the experimental one, the staff treatment one) where she was having her eye seen to. By the time he found it, she was coming out, a new, lighter eye patch over the injured orb.

"Ah. Getting better, I hope?" he mustered a smile.

"On the way to it," she replied. "I'd forgotten how much steroid injections hurt in certain areas."

"I'm sorry. Listen, next Mr. Black and Hank want to show us this 'Cerebro' they've been talking about, but I was hoping you and I could talk first."

"All right," she agreed.

"I want all of us to get along," he said. "I think it's important that we, as mutants, as a team, should get along well, but I'm afraid I just don't see that happening with you smacking me around and picking on me all the time. Um." The last part of it wasn't exactly how he meant to phrase it, but even as he braced himself for a blow or a stinging remark, he saw that instead he had struck a nerve.

She winced. "Ow. You know, last night, Erik asked me if I was always so forthright, and I said, no I wasn't always that much of a bitch, but I don't seem to have improved any in the last eighteen hours, have I? Yes, I have been bashing you around more than you deserve, and I'm sorry."

They were walking down a hall of the complex, and had come to a door out to a balcony with seats, evidently a smoker's area, to judge by the butts left lying around.

"Shall we step outside and have a seat?" he suggested, "It's a little awkward talking to you while walking, I find I have to bend down to hear you." She nodded. Once out there, he sat down at one end of a bench while she took a chair opposite.

"Why do you think I deserve bashing at all?" he asked. "Yes, I could have handled matters better. But surely there was a friendlier, less violent way of letting me know—and frankly, while I appreciate that you and Raven are becoming friends, she is my sister, and our relationship goes back years, not hours. I would be more willing to talk to you about her and any problems she may be having that I should know about, if you had approached me in a more discreet and, well, friendly way. I don't know what I've done to become the target of disdain."

She thought about it for a little while. "I—partly it's because I know you are capable of being a much better man. But it's not reasonable of me to expect the twenty-six year old guy you are now to have the depth and maturity—the sensitivity of the man you'll be when you're fifty-two. That's a lot of living to get through. That's very wrong of me, and I am sorry. I truly and sincerely beg your pardon."

"Apology accepted," he said, "although I admit I don't understand exactly how this prescience of yours works. You say you 'remember' the future. Unless you are a time traveler, in which case—." He broke off. While he couldn't read her mind as such, he could tell whether she was telling the truth. "Joon-Yi, _are_ you a time traveler?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "Alternative universe theory enters into it, and I admit I would rather this was an entirely different universe than the one I came from, because I'd rather be writing a new future on a blank page than trying to throw myself in front of a metaphoric train to stop the inevitable like Anna Karenina. And again, I don't want anyone to know this. Not_ anyone_. Least of all—."

He anticipated her. "—the CIA."

"—Raven and Erik."

"What? Why? Why not?"

"Here," she said. "I'll enlarge my energy shield, so you can see it as I did."

And it was worse than he could have imagined.

Every bit of it was true. He could tell it was, the very depth and texture of her memories, all the details, the smells, the sounds— and she was sane. This was not the fevered delusion of a schizophrenic. She was as clear and level headed as anyone could be. He had read her mind more deeply than he had ever read anyone's since he learned to control his powers, and it left him feeling as though…as though they had been married and lived together for many years, only then divorced for irreconcilable differences. It was a shock, when she broke contact, contracting her energy field, to realize that there were feet and feet of empty space between them, and that skin sealed them off from one another.

"You could argue that maybe it won't turn out that way," she said, "or that maybe there's no way of stopping it, that it's destiny. Or that whatever I, or we, might do would only make it worse. I confess I don't know what the right thing to do is., but I do know what the wrong thing to do is, and that is to do nothing. I shared it with you because—it's too big to handle alone. I hope you'll help me."

" I don't know what to say," he admitted. "I almost wish I didn't know. The stakes are suddenly so high. I…We can't let this happen. Of course I'll help."

"And yet, you know something?" She wiped her face with a tissue; she had been crying, and the adhesive on the eye patch had come loose. "If I have to be completely honest with myself, I don't want to change the future for all the untold millions I'll never meet or know. I just want to make things right for the ones I care about, and that's Erik and Raven and you. Even if you are a bit of a jerk. But then that's traditional—for kid brothers."

"Kid brother," he exclaimed. "Since when?"

"I just adopted you," she said. "Seriously, though. Friends?"

"Friends," he decided, holding out his hand. Then he remembered, and tried to draw it back in embarrassment, but her energy hand, unseen but present, had already taken his.

Shaking it felt surprisingly natural. "Friends," he repeated, and he liked the idea.

Some hours later: Charles Xavier paused by the door to his sister's room and listened using his ears, not his mind. There seemed to be a lot of laughter going on in there, but he could also hear Joon-Yi saying, "—If he says you can't get pregnant doing it standing up, don't believe it. If he says he's had a vasectomy, don't believe it. Not even if he has a note from his doctor! Starting to see a theme here?"

"Yes!" That was Raven, and the word was choked out between giggling fits.

"Seriously, though. If you don't know him well enough to talk to him about what the two of you would do if you have a birth control failure _well_ before it becomes a possibility, you don't know him well enough to be doing that with him. Then there are sexually transmitted diseases…"

Well, at least Joon-Yi was being thorough, and he knew now that he could trust her. He kept going.

* * *

><p>AN: Okay, I've read up on Magneto's children, and…it's making my head ache. Twins raised by artificially evolved farm animals? Who he didn't recognize even though Pietro looks _just like him_? (And damned if I don't think there's some Flowers In The Attic drama going on between him and his sister.)

Therefore, Pietro and Wanda will not be putting in an appearance in this universe. If they're your favorites, I'm sorry, but I am going to retcon them out of existence on the grounds that they will add nothing and only complicate matters. Erik and his wife Magda had one child, Anya, who died in a fire, Magda was_** not**_ pregnant again at the time, and that's it. Full tragic story to be told in an upcoming chapter.

Mind you, they _did_ exist in the universe Joon-Yi came from, but that's due to multiversal variation and random fluctuations in the space-time continuum.

Also, the next chapter will take place before Joon-Yi has The Talk with Raven.


	26. Wisdom

Erik hung back in order to watch Raven and McCoy. They were such children, in the golden early days of their lives, making a little picnic for themselves under the airplane model. Yes, they were in love—for the moment. He knew from bitter experience that this sort of love, based on youth and health and attraction, did not last. No doubt Charles or Joon-Yi would couch the reason in more scientific terms, but he saw it as this: nature famously cared for quantity of life more than quality. Her overwhelming directive was to continue the species, to pass on one's genes, and here was how she did it; with a honeyed promise of happiness.

But in five years or so, perhaps a little longer, after they'd had a child or two and raised them out of the most fragile stages of life, the honey would be all used up, the passion between them reduced to cold ashes and the spouse they looked at across the breakfast table, a stranger. Sometimes, yes, sometimes love lasted after all. But so often it didn't, and people ground on together unhappily for decades, although nowadays divorces seemed to be more common.

Magda, at seventeen, had been beautiful, so beautiful. Russet hair, wild-rose skin, all pink and white, hazel eyes. And he himself was nineteen, as virginal as those two children sharing their sandwiches, and at that age, he didn't yet know what would really matter. That was back when he was pretending to be human, of course. Had he been content to remain in that farming commune, perhaps he would be there still, with Magda and half a dozen more children. Still pretending to be human, still believing he was unique and alone in his difference, still waiting for Schmidt to come after him.

No, this was better.

"I always promised myself I'd find a cure. Ever since I was a little boy. You have no idea what I'd give to feel—." McCoy began, and Raven chimed in. "Normal."

They laughed, a little uneasy. "Charles has never understood. He's different, but it's not in a way that shows." Raven said. "Joon-Yi, though. I mean, you and I can conceal it, but she can't. People might just think she's crippled, but then she's also Asian, and that makes her different too. This morning we were going to go into this diner, and it had a sign in the window that said, 'No Colored, No Dogs'. If we hadn't been there with Joon-Yi, I don't think I would have thought more than, 'oh, that's terrible', but otherwise, it wouldn't have affected me. She might not have been allowed in to eat if she were alone.

"She and I talked for the longest time last night, and she said it's partly being the age we are, that everybody goes through this time where they want to feel normal but don't. Even the most normal people out there. When you figure out who you are, when you fit into your own skin, that's your normal, and you won't even notice when it happens. I asked her if_she_ felt normal, and she _grinned_ at me. She said normal people only dreamed of having a life like hers."

"—that, um, shows a lot of confidence," McCoy replied.

"Uh-huh. And that's how I want to feel. This serum you're working on—well, this is going to sound strange, but you know that fairytale _TheLittleMermaid_? The mermaid gives up her voice to get legs and feet instead of a tail, but every step she takes is like walking on knives. And she did it out of love for the prince, but she doesn't get a happily-ever-after. The prince uses her, and then he marries somebody else. I don't want to give up my voice and wind up worse off in other ways. I know I'm not as well educated as you are, but how do you change one thing and not everything? It seems so…easy. Too easy."

"Well, it isn't done yet," McCoy said. "But with your help, I know I'll be a lot closer. If anyone's genes hold the key to changing appearance, yours do."

"I do want to help," she said, extending her arm. "But I have to admit—when guys ask me out, they're not usually after my blood."

"I'm sorry, I didn't intend to be forward, I just—." he backpedaled. "I was excited. Scientifically, I mean."

"Hank, you weren't being forward. That's kind of what I meant."

"—no. But I'm sorry if you thought I was." he apologized.

"I'm sorry that you weren't," she cut him off, leaning forward as he began to draw her blood.

What might have been their first kiss was interrupted by someone else entering the room. More than one someone, in fact.

"Well, what if I _had_ told you your epicanthic fold was an extremely groovy mutation?" Xavier asked.

"I think I would have laughed and said that I preferred to call it my plica palpobronasalis but I have to know someone very well before I'd be willing to talk about my parietal bone." Joon-Yi replied.

"Then I would probably have fainted dead away on the spot from shock and awe at your comeback," he admitted.

"Perhaps I should have a t-shirt printed up that says 'Warning: Contents may sass you into unconsciousness'. Seriously, though. If that's the game you're bringing to the table, you have to upgrade it. Possibly your wardrobe as well. 'Graduate Student Who Doesn't Own An Iron' only works while you're still a graduate student."

"All right, I just have to know," Raven jumped up to join them. "What _is_your pica palpobrontosaurus or whatever you just said?"

Joon-Yi laughed and said, "It's the skin fold of the eyelid that makes Asian eyes what they are, and it comes from having flattish nasal bones. I'd say it was a Mongoloid feature if the word Mongoloid hadn't been hijacked to refer to people with Down Syndrome."

"As you can see, we've kissed and made up," Xavier put in.

"You two kissed?" Raven's eyes grew wide.

"That would be made _out_, not made _up_," Joon-Yi corrected. " There was no actual kissing involved. He's agreed to try and be less of a jerk and I've agreed to try and be less of a witch. With any luck, we'll wind up good friends. So what's going on here?"

On being told of McCoy's serum, she transfixed him with her good eye and asked, "So what kind of laboratory trials have you conducted so far?" Moving over to his work area, they talked shop until Mr. Black joined them.

But the last thing she said, as they broke off to join the others, was, "I know you're impatient, but don't rush this. Conduct more trials, not fewer. Above all, don't go trying it on yourself the moment you think you've got it."

"She is right, you know," Xavier put in. "It would be dreadfully unscientific of you—and speaking as another overly clever person, might I suggest that part of the alienation you seem to feel is due to the distance from your peer group imposed by your advancement beyond them in education? Graduating from college at fifteen is bound to make you feel the odd man out. Now shall we go and see this Cerebro?"

* * *

><p><span>Joon-Yi:<span> Hopefully now that Charles Francis 'Peter Pan' Xavier knows what's at stake, it will light a fire under his butt.

Letting Charles Xavier in on my secret was a risk, but I did it anyhow. If there is one person who could find a good reason, a compassionate and compelling reason why I should not kill Erik and Raven, it was he. I have always believed in his message and his vision, even if I found his methods ineffective and placatory. Can there not be a middle ground between the pacifist and the militant, (or to put it more bluntly, between the wishy-washy and the appalling)? Some other way of doing things? And if there is another way, then what is it?

Cerebro, as it turns out, amplifies mental powers by imitating the brain waves it picks up. The intention was that Charles would use it to identify more mutants who the CIA would then recruit. Erik and I were in complete agreement about the idea of the government having a list of mutants. We both thought it was bad. Left to his own devices, I am not sure what Charles would have done, but he agreed with us. Only mutants will go out to recruit other mutants.

So we all crossed the grounds to the small geodesic dome where Cerebro is housed. I was hard put not to laugh, because the user interface helmet, I am sorry, reminded me of Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in BackToTheFuture, where he had a colander with wires on his head.

Despite Erik's snarky comments, the contraption did not set fire to Charles's head, but instead obligingly spat back a long list of coordinates. I like that approach—the CIA may search latitude and longitude all they like and never find a mutant without Charles' help.

The upshot of all of this is that Charles and Erik will set out tomorrow on a recruitment drive. (I am temporarily benched because I am barred from flying until the doctor is satisfied that my eye will not explode. Although he has never examined an Asian's eyes before, he seems to think I have an unusual ridge of tissue under my upper eyelid, and wants to examine me further. I think I may have Dr, McCoy take a look instead.

On the subject of Hank McCoy—yum. I would so love to drag him into the nearest supply closet and fog up his glasses, but the Girl Code forbids me to lay a hand on him, now that Raven and I are friends. And if that doesn't cool me down, I can just imagine him when he is blue and furry. I am all for happily consenting adults doing whatever they want together, but personally, the whole furry/plushy thing leaves me going 'Eeeeewww.' I know, I know, there's a difference between a real person and a full-body costume stained with dubious fluids, but it is not for me either way.

Moving right along with this account of my day, we then were shown to our rooms, and I used some of the time before dinner to unpack. While I was in the middle of that, there came a knock on my door. It was Erik.

"I am not entirely easy in my mind about flying off with Charles and leaving you and Raven alone here among these people," he announced. "McCoy works for them, and may not prove reliable in an emergency."

"Oh. Thank you for caring," I said, "What did you have in mind? Combat training?"

"No, more along the lines of having a look the grounds and plotting out an escape route," he said. "But I like the way you think."

"I'd rather hear that than be told I'm pretty," I said. "All right."

Once out front, we surveyed the landscape, which had that slightly curled-edge look that the Mid Atlantic region gets around the end of summer, slightly seared and dried up. "It's at least a mile from here to the main road as the crow flies," Erik said, taking out his sunglasses and putting them on. "The drive isn't perfectly straight, which makes it longer if you stick to the road."

"That's at least ten minutes, probably more like fifteen, on foot," I said. "I am not the fastest runner around, and there were three checkpoints along the way, staffed by three men each. Nine men, all heavily armed, between us and the road. I do not like that. We might be able to get a car, given Raven's talents, but then again we might not. I won't count on it."

"Can your energy field stop bullets?" he asked.

"I think so, if I can harden it in time," I replied. "But I would not like to find out the hard way that I'm wrong."

"Combat training at some point in the near future," he nodded. "Definitely. Going either to the left or the right looks unpromising—too much ground to cover."

"Do you suppose they have heat-sensing scanners?" I asked. " I have no idea how I would show up on one of them."

"They might," he allowed.

"Then there is the vista behind us." We turned to look at the woods.

"Up for a pre-dinner walk?" he asked.

"Why not?"

It was nice under the trees, and his shades came back off. I know how I ought to talk to him and act toward him, which is as though he is a virtual stranger, but I can't. As a result, I seem to be sending him the wrong signals. That is the only way I can account for what happened on that walk…

TBC.

* * *

><p>AN: Slightly short, but Batman: Arkham City just came out. More soon, though.

Thanks to Penguinsnuggles and Neon Knightly!


	27. What?

The wooded area behind the compound was old-growth forest, never cut for timber, to judge by the size of the trees and the broken rather than sawed-off look of the tree stumps. As they walked along the wood-chip strewn path, Joon-Yi occasionally pointed out something to him-a chipmunk scurrying in the leaves, the 'Peet-Peet!' call of a cardinal. He could easily imagine her doing the same with a child one day. Their child.

Soon, though, the path curved around to go back to the building complex, and the only option to continue onward was a deer trail. They chose to go on.

Charles was right, he thought. Interacting with Joon-Yi was not like interacting with a stranger. Walking with her, talking to her like this—there was a natural ease in it. Knowing their future freed something in him; whatever happened, whatever he said, it would be all right. Eventually, anyhow.

She stumbled, and he reached out automatically to steady her. A small contact, no more, but he relished it. It was too soon to try to kiss her, and problematic, due to their disparity in height. Sitting down would make that intimacy much easier- -and lying down would make matters _very_ easy.

"Thank you," she said righting herself. "I'm really looking forward to getting my depth perception back. Having only one good eye is inconvenient- -and by the way, thank you for keeping to my pace," she said, smiling at him. "Some tall people just go striding around everywhere with their long legs, leaving we petite folk running after them."

"Think nothing of it," he said. "…do you mind if I ask you a somewhat personal question?"

"Ask it, and I'll see if I mind," she replied.

"How did you wind up in America? I know you mentioned being adopted, but—." He sought for a way to end the sentence diplomatically.

"But I don't seem like the most obvious or desirable candidate for adoption?" She understood what he was trying to ask, and replied without offense. "You haven't reckoned with the strength of white liberal guilt. I was their way of giving something back to the world, or at least that's how it started out. Having adopted me, they saw it through. I was not an easy kid to raise, nor, at times, to love, either."

"Really?" he asked, "You were adopted by a white family? That must have raised some eyebrows."

"Oh, yes. Not so much because I was of another race as on account of the unfortunate fact that I was a very ugly baby."

"You certainly outgrew that!" he said, "I am going to say something personal again. Every time I see you, it surprises me how small you are, and then I forget it again. When you aren't there, or when I'm speaking to you, I don't usually think of it."

"I like to think I'm not so much short as I am concentrated," She punctuated the sentence with a smile and a nod. "Now do you mind if I ask _you_ how you wound up named Erik-with-a-K instead of Erich-with-a-ch?"

"Not at all," he replied. "A Scandinavian great-grandfather, which also accounts for my eyes. A—lot of people found it remarkable, at one time, that a Jew should have such blue eyes."

She cast a concerned glance at him. "Stereotypes," she commented. "If I believed them, I'd be meek, biddable, and pathetically eager to please. All right, sometimes I am quiet, but not as a matter of policy."

That made him chuckle. "I wonder how you ever managed to last seven days with Schmidt, much less seven months"

"Very carefully," she said. "He wasn't present much of the time, and when he was, he was in his Shaw persona. I assure you I did not always speak to him as I did last night."

"As far as I am concerned, what you said to him ought to be immortalized in some way. What struck me, however, was that you objected to his plan not on the grounds that it was evil or insane, but because it was stupid."

"Well, it was!" she protested. "Was and is, although I'm sure he's persuaded himself I have no idea what I'm talking about and is proceeding forward anyhow. Morality is quite often a point of view-the ape that is the tenderest mother to her own baby will kill and eat that of another. Sanity is equally arguable. Stupid, though, is stupid no matter how you cut it."

"Yet the theory of a 'nuclear winter', and what damage it would cause to the environment is new and quite advanced, from what Dr. McCoy said earlier."

"I guess I'm just ahead of the curve," she said. "No, I'm not a genius theorist. I do a lot of reading, and that with my time-confused memory is where I get it from. I've snuck a peek at the answers in the back of the book. Anyhow, I was really only trying to distract him so he wouldn't necessarily notice he was slowly suffocating. If I were better at self defense, he might be dead right now, but as it is, I doubt he even experienced any brain damage."

"That is what I like. Finding someone else who is prepared to be practical and pragmatic," he smiled.

"I was afflicted with practicality at the age of five, and I've never fully recovered," she said.

"What happened when you were five?"

"Well, as I said, I was not the easiest child to raise. Especially when it came to, well, to toilet training me completely." She raised her prosthetic arms. "In those days, I didn't have powers."

"I see the difficulty," he said. He was now wondering exactly how she had managed that aspect of personal care.

"Yeah, well, when I was ready to start Kindergarten, I still required some assistance in the bathroom. My mother didn't want to turn me over to the halls of education like that, so she told me if I could be a big girl and take care of everything every single time, I could go to the regular kindergarten, but if I couldn't, I'd have to go to the special kindergarten. Then she took me to see what they were like. The special kindergarten was for children with cerebral palsy and mental retardation, and I knew I didn't want to go there."

"So you learned how to handle matters?" he asked.

"No, I told my mother I thought I would rather stay home with her, because I already knew everything they were studying in the regular kindergarten. I was already reading independently and knew basic math."

"Forthright even at that age, I see."

"I'm afraid so," she shrugged, smiling. "But she told me it didn't work that way, and left me in the special kindergarten for a while. With the teacher's permission, of course. That was enough for me. In retrospect, it was an empty threat, because they never would have been able to cope with me in the special class on a permanent basis. The greater lesson I got from it, though, was that being able to do things yourself opened up bigger worlds, and that independence is worth it. And I'm afraid that was a bit more information than you might ever have wanted to know about me."

"I don't mind. Your character certainly began forming early."

"Perhaps."

"Returning to the subject of Schmidt, though," he asked, curious. "What is it he sets in motion that is so inimcal to mutants? What happens on November 22nd?"

"I'm not altogether sure. My glimpses of the future are, well, erratic. Some things I remember as though I were a witness to events, while others are like things I've read in the newspaper or seen on TV. November 22nd, 1962 is one of the latter. It's the day when America and the Soviets come the closest they will ever come to all-out nuclear war, and the conflict is escalated by the presence of mutants and ended by a conflict between the mutants themselves. I wish I could say that if we just make sure we're all a thousand miles away drinking iced tea and playing croquet genteely in a garden, then everything will be all right, but since mutants were there before, I think we'll wind up there again."

"If Schmidt is there, if I have not already killed him, then I will be there," Erik stated. "You know, if he succeeds, he will expect to be praised and adored for what he did. He will expect thanks, when the more rational response would be to rend him limb from limb."

"Well, rending him limb from limb is a bit messy for my tastes, but if it comes to it, I'd hold your jacket for you while you did it. At a safe distance, of course." Joon-Yi said, reflectively.

"Do you mean that?" he looked at her sharply, meeting her eye. "Do you truly mean that?"

She faltered, her gaze dropping. "I- -am prepared to kill him or to help you kill him. He is a rabid animal loose in the world, only instead of frothing at the mouth, he froths at the brain. His influence infects others. Had I not known him for what he is, and if I were unsure of myself, angry and afraid, as many mutants are, he could have persuaded me to follow him." She paused, then went on.

"But there is a difference between putting down a mad thing and murdering someone. Since it must be done, let it be done quickly, let it be done without making a mess, and then let us walk away, knowing we have done the right thing."

"I want to marry you." he said, without thinking, and it was a wonder that it hadn't come out, 'I'm going to marry you.'

"...What?" she asked.

"I want to marry you. I'm not asking you yet, and I don't expect an answer now. I simply want to make my intentions clear, and give you a chance to-to get used to the idea."


	28. Wintergreen

A/N: Yesterday I posted a different version of this chapter, but after re-reading it a couple of times, I decided it was weak and took it down. This is, I hope, a better one. If you read it yesterday, the ending is rather different than before. Comments and suggestions are welcomed…

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><p>I've collected some interesting propositions over the years (some people are kinky <em>for <em>people with missing limbs, lots of white guys have Asian chick fantasies) but never an actual proposal. Until now. A proposal of sorts, anyway.

And there I am, with a traffic jam of reactions in my head, my libido cheering 'Yes! Now! Yes!' and my sense of self-preservation slamming on the breaks, my common sense trying to get a word in, and every other aspect of me weighing in at the same time, and what comes out of my mouth?

"Would you please kiss me?"

Yeah, that came from the same compartment as 'I had no idea you would look like this when you were young.'

"Yes," Erik said. He smiled wider than I have seen him smile yet, stepped forward, took my face in his hands, and kissed me.

I have kissed guys before, and done more than kiss, but…again, it goes back to the paroxetine. I kissed them, and it was nothing to me, no more arousing than if their lips were those wax novelties with sugar syrup inside, (except that the syrup would have tasted good, unlike some of their breaths). All in all, when it came to kisses, give me the chocolate kind wrapped in a twist of foil any time.

Not this time, though, because that kiss was everything I could have wanted a kiss to be, and yes, I remembered who this was, and that in fifty years he would not look this good and in fifty-one years he would be dead and…

He broke the contact, and asked, "Wintergreen?"

"Ye-yes," I said, because he had to have tasted it on my mouth. "I had a leaf in my mouth, it grows wild here—mmph." You can guess why I said 'mmph', only now instead of around my face, his hands were around my waist, and he pulled me closer, and…that could be his belt buckle, or it could be…

"Wait!" I pushed him away to arm's length, _because_ I did not want to. I wanted to do more, and go further, but I still possessed some grain of sanity and it would be awfully hard to convince him I did not want to marry him after helping him take my panties off. This wasn't 2013, after all, and there were so many, many other reasons why it would be a bad idea.

He didn't look angry. He looked happy, so in the hope that he could take this well, I continued, "This isn't a yes. I don't think we know each other anywhere near well enough for this. We met less than twenty-four hours ago!"

"It doesn't seem as though we just met," he pointed out. "Not with how we talk to each other. Not with the way we understand each other with just a look. Certainly not just now—."

"I can't account for that," I said, a little wildly. "And I don't think a relationship that begins with planning a homicide together could possibly turn out to be healthy in the long run. Look at Macbeth and Lady Macbeth for a start. One little murder, and their happy marriage just came to pieces."

He chuckled. "This," he said, gesturing to his face. "This is why I think—no, why I know—there is something between us, something worth the wait, something that will last. Yes, we've known each other less then twenty-four hours, but in that twenty-four hours, I have smiled, genuinely smiled, I've even laughed, I've talked as I haven't in months. Years, in truth. You—lighten my heart."

"Oh, god," I groaned. That was because I knew how to make Mr. Magnussen smile and even laugh on occasion. I knew what to talk to him about, and how he would respond. "Maybe I'm just a naturally humorous person. In any case, I would make a terrible wife. I am sorely lacking in practically every traditional wifely skill. I'm not good at sewing, and the only time I scrub a floor is if I spill something—stop looking at me like that!" He looked as though he were highly amused.

"I'm not looking for a housekeeper. In any case, I'm not asking you at this time, so how do you propose we go about getting to know one another better?" he asked.

In ways that didn't involve touching, I thought, because it would skew my judgment. "I think that telling each other things we think the other ought to know and asking questions is working just fine, so how about we continue that and continue walking at the same time? I think there must be a clearing or a road or something up ahead, because it's a lot brighter that way."

"Very well. Hmm—what should you know about me? While I don't have the formal education you and Charles have, I've audited courses in various universities across Europe as my agenda permits. My powers give me a unique knowledge of certain aspects of physics."

"I was wondering if it would be something like that, since you were keeping apace with us in discussions."

We reached the bright area, which turned out to be a wide meadow of tall grasses mixed with self-seeded wildflowers, mostly goldenrod and scrubby wild asters in purple and white. Across the meadow was a band of loose shale and other stones, followed by a tall chain link fence topped with both barbed and razor wire. "You know, I think I hear either a busy road or a fast-moving river," I said, heading out into the meadow. "Doesn't it smell nice?"

"Yes," he replied. "Tell me, why do you keep on wearing those artificial arms when you don't need them at all?"

"You mean, do I have a reason other than not wanting the normals to freak out? Yes, I do, but a woman has to have some things she keeps to herself alone." Grasshoppers and crickets leapt up as we approached, whirring off into deeper grass.

"Stop a moment," he said. "You've picked up a passenger."

"Have I?" I stood still, craning to look over my shoulder. "Just as long as it isn't a tick…"

"It's not, and that's the wrong shoulder." Of course it would be on the side where I couldn't see. Reaching me, he carefully picked something off my arm and held it out where I could see.

"A praying mantis! I love these guys, they're like miniature T. Rexes. Tyrannosaurus Rex, that is. Doesn't it have beautiful eyes?"

"I prefer yours," he said. Which was how we wound up kissing for the third time, because our faces were so close together. At least his hands were tied up with holding the mantis.

"Erik, this is happening too fast for me to be comfortable with," I said when he pulled away. "I feel pressured and confused. If you're sincere, please give me some breathing room."

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to frighten you. There!" He tossed the mantis into the sky, and it spread its wings, flying off. "You are as free as it is."

"Thank you," I said. "I'm not so much frightened by you, though, as by myself. No, no more touching right now. Please. Let's check out what's on the other side of that fence. Climbing it isn't a problem, not for me, anyhow. A chain link fence might as well be a ladder when you have small feet and you're lightweight, and I can hold down the wire at the top."

"Schff," Erik made a scoffing noise. "Too time consuming." He made a gesture, and the fence unknitted itself, top to bottom , the edges curling back.

"Show-off," I accused him, and we went through the gap. Past the fence, the landscape suddenly took a downward slope to a good-sized river below. "If we can get down to the water, and getting down is just a matter of not going too fast, then once we reach the water, there's no longer any problem. I don't know how well Raven can swim, but I can keep her afloat even if all she can do is doggy paddle."

"Then that's one aspect of escape solved," Erik said. "The next problem is money. How are you situated as far as cash is concerned?"

"No problems whatsoever. I'm flush from Vegas." I told him.

"To the tune of—?"

"Well, I sold my car, withdrew all my savings, and hit the casinos. When you can move things without seeming to touch them, there's almost no limit to what you can rake in—you're nodding." I broke off. "You've done it yourself."

"The roulette tables at Monte Carlo. I can make the ball do anything I want it to. The trick is not to win too much all in one place, to lose some of the time, and to have your way out planned before you go in."

"Of course! I also hit the craps tables, and—oh, we have_ got _to hit Atlantic City. As a group." I added hastily. "Raven would handle the money transport, because nobody would be able to follow her. I bet Hank could learn to count cards for Blackjack, and Charles—."

"A born poker player," Erik said. "Except he'd be too ethical to cheat other gamblers. We'd have to find some game where he plays only the house."

We chatted about that as we went back inside the fence, which knitted itself back together, but with a difference. "Here," Erik pointed out. "Just undo this bit of wire, and it'll spring open again. You know, of course, that it's not enough to have the money if you don't have it on you…Now _you're_ nodding."

"I fixed that," I told him.

"How—ah. Don't tell me. Your arms."

"Now you know my secret. I borrowed a few items from Hank on the grounds that I needed to fix them, which I did. They needed oiling. They're hollow inside, so I filed them open and sealed them up with epoxy filler afterward."

"Very clever."

"Thank you," I replied, and we started back across the meadow. Halfway across, something just popped out of me, and it was something big. Something I had never even told Mr. Magnussen.

"I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen. It was a very inept attempt, and it obviously failed, but I did try."

"What?" Erik asked.

"It's something you ought to know about me. To give you the background behind why I wanted to die, I have to go back to something which happened six weeks before that…" I explained about the attack in the girls' locker room, the toilet, and my teeth getting knocked out, and I did it as undramatically as I could. I mean, here he was, a Holocaust Survivor. What was my bullying incident compared to _that_?

"—the girls' families settled out of court after our legal service explained that a jury would find me unusually sympathetic under the circumstances, and so did the school district. But I was…left emotionally quite fragile. I had panic attacks, bad ones, at random times and sometimes for no apparent reason—oh, and one of the girls who only stood and watched, she was the daughter of a couple who were friends of my parents. I'd known her all my life, I'd thought we were good friends. Well, she came over to apologize, and she cried and—I couldn't stand to be in the room with her ever again. I forgave her, but I couldn't keep from hyperventilating and passing out. So my folks wound up having to drop hers as friends, and I know that hurt them.

"So I wasn't sleeping and I hardly ate for weeks. It wasn't so much the physical attack as the weight of knowing what it all meant. No one would stand up for me while I was being tormented and half-killed. Not my friends, not my lab partner. _No one_. The thought of going through my whole life knowing that friendship was hollow and meaningless and that there was such darkness in everyone—I thought I couldn't live with it.

"One night, I got up in the middle of the night, after midnight, and I drank three-quarters of a bottle of liquid cold medicine, the kind that makes you sleepy. No suicide note, no hints or talking about it before hand—just glug-glug-glug, and never waking up again, I thought. But that stuff tastes terrible, and I was trying to take it on an empty stomach, so I threw up before I even got out of the bathroom. I remember looking at my vomit fanned out over the tile floor and thinking what a pretty green it was. The medicine was tinted emerald green, you see.

"My mother woke up when I puked—she has a sixth sense for when one of us is sick. She can tell from two states away, much less just down the hall. She came running, found me, and called an ambulance. I didn't need my stomach pumped, because it was doing a good job of emptying itself, but I did wind up in the psychiatric ward of our local Children's Hospital for the better part of a week. That was my own fault. When the admitting physician asked me why I tried to kill myself like that, I told him I would have cut my wrists but I couldn't find a vein. It turns out he didn't get deadpan humor, so he put down that I was seriously delusional, affectless, and potentially psychotic."

"Surely not!" Erik burst out. "The man was that unperceptive?"

"He was _exactly_ that unperceptive. That was how I learned not to joke with psychiatrists. The psych ward—there are sadder places in this world than a psychiatric ward for children, but it's up there. When you're on suicide watch, they make you sleep in the hallway, so they can keep an eye on you. Like with the special kindergarten, I decided that was not where I wanted to be, so I sucked it up and put on a good enough face to go home, went to a number of therapists and tried out medications until they found one that worked well enough for me to function. And I functioned, which is a whole lot better than not functioning."

"Paroxetine," he said.

"How did you know that?" I stared at him.

"Don't you remember what you said last night, when you were dosed up with codeine?"

"No. What all did I say?"

"Nothing too terrible," he said. "Some of it—perhaps I'll tell you some day. Not yet, though."

"Now I know I really ought to know. What did I say?"

"Never mind that now. You never tried again?" he asked.

"No, it was the impulse of the moment, a very bad moment, and a very stupid impulse. I don't have any great life-affirming revelations to share from that experience. I got over that moment, and I was very lucky. Over time, I got better, and eventually I became a grown-up. It's rewarding being a grown-up; there's so much less drama. Then things got…complicated. I got mixed up in something that I can't talk about, not yet anyway. Now my family doesn't know I'm alive, and right now, that's how it has to be."

"I am quite glad you failed," he said, and his voice was gentle when he said it. "But there's part you left out, which is when you went off the paroxetine and your powers developed."

"It's not my complete history," I replied. "But I thought you should know about it. I've never told anyone about it, outside of therapists." By this time we were back off the deer trail and on the man-made path again, halfway back to the complex.

Then, just as abruptly as I'd told him about my failed suicide, he said, "You've told me your worst. Can I do other than share mine? Or part of mine; I have so _much_ to choose from. I'm a widower. I was once a father, too."

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><p>Yes, another cliffie. TBC…. BTW, this is NOT my life story retold in any way whatsoever. I have never tried to commit suicide. This grew out of Joon-Yi's comment back in chapter 5 that she was a kid with problems, and I began to wonder what those problems were besides the obvious.<p>

Thank you so much to reviewers Aislynn, Neon Knightly, Penguinsnuggles, and Trickster!


	29. The Camp

A/N: So last chapter got very little response, and I think it was at least partly due to the abrupt change in tone from happy smooching in the tall grass to a disturbing suicide attempt revelation.

Well, if you didn't like that turn toward darkness, you're going to hate this chapter. I read This Way For The Gas, Ladies And Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski in college. It's a thinly fictionalized account of what life was really like in Auschwitz, written by a survivor. A few days ago I pulled it out and read it again to give Erik's experiences in the concentration camp some real detail. It will be disturbing. You have been warned, but if you skip this chapter on those grounds, you'll be missing something important.

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><p>Up until he said those words, Erik had been enjoying the walk very much. What perverse demon, determined to ruin this light-hearted hour, had seized his tongue? But he knew it was he himself, it had always been he himself.<p>

Their first kiss, and Joon-Yi had asked _him_. He had not kissed anyone since the day he lost both wife and child, and he had leaned forward not knowing what to expect of this half-innocent, half-worldly young woman. Yet she had returned it with an ardor that surprised them both and left her trembling at his touch. He might have pressed that advantage, turned that reluctant no to a willing yes and seduced her there in the meadow.

And if she were only human and meant nothing to him, he might have, but Joon-Yi would be his wife, and that meant there must be both trust and honor between them. They would have to trust each other. Above all else, they would have to trust each other, and he did not want to begin matters badly.

So he let her go and listened to her instead, which was hardly a punishment. He was glad she had had a good and loving family, glad that only the shadow of hatred and despair had ebbed over into her life, and ebbed away again leaving her untainted. She was clean-hearted.

And now he was going to spread poison over this day, because any rational person would recoil from what he had to tell her. He would flee from it himself, if only it did not follow after him.

"Her name was Magda," he began, "and I cannot tell you about her without telling you about the camp, because we fled it together. Not by any design or knowledge of each other, but like two bits of flotsam that stuck together and washed up on the same shore. Auschwitz—suppose instead of shoving your head in the toilet themselves, your bullies got your friends to do it for them. Not because they had a gun to their heads, but for some slight privilege or improvement in their lot."

"I can imagine that quite easily," Joon-Yi replied. " 'Do it, and we'll be your friends.' 'Do it or you can't come to my party.' It's not that great a step, and if tormenting one person is fun, two must be even better."

"Yes, and when the bullies have thousands of people to play with, and more arriving every day, they reach ever greater refinements of cruelty." He stopped for a moment to slow his breathing. "If it was only Nazis tormenting all of us, that would have been easier to bear. Instead they made us turn on each other. The day we arrived—we were two days getting there, from Dusseldorf to the camp, on the train, in a cattle car, crammed in so tightly that if someone fainted or died, they didn't fall down. With no water, either, nothing but whatever food or drink we brought our selves. By the time we got there, the corners of the car were mounded up with excrement—our excrement—and babies.

"_Dead_ babies, suffocated or crushed to death in the crowd. Dead Jew babies, buried in piles of shit. There was a prison detail there, a team of prisoners whose job it was to confiscate whatever parcels we'd brought and sort through them. Oh, they were glad to see us—because while of course the Reich got the gold and the valuables, they got the food! But among them were a luckless few who got to clean out the cars, and one of them—one of them came out holding a pair of dead babies in each hand, by the feet, like chickens trussed for market. He was angry about it, and he made some of the women in our group take them. That way, he didn't have to take them to the crematorium himself!"

He was aware his voice had gone up in volume as he went on, and now he paused for breath. They had stopped in a clearing, and Joon-Yi was watching him with a face gone as pale as milk tea. She'd taken off her neckerchief with the butterflies and was twisting it in her prosthetic hooks, dabbing at her face now and then, silent tears spilling out of her eyes. The eye patch was more off than on, loosened by her crying.

"More than you bargained for when you kissed me?" he asked.

"If you can bear to talk about it, I can bear to listen," she replied.

"There is so much more that I could talk for a year and not finish….Anyone who was good, kind, innocent or gentle died very quickly. It was the mean and the selfish, the thieves, the connivers, the squealers, the boot-lickers and the ass-kissers who survived."

"And which were you, that you survived?" she asked, but it was asked in sorrow, not in accusation.

"I? Oh, I belonged to Schmidt, but you knew that. They herded us into the camp proper, and then began dividing us up, women and girls one way, men and boys another. All the way, my father had urged that whatever we did, we had to stick together, not winding up in different cars or different camps, but there was my mother, being taken away. That was the first time my power manifested. I bent the gate while they pulled us in different directions—then they clubbed me down with their rifle butts.

"When I came to, I was lying on a bench with my head in my mother's lap. I don't know what happened to my father. He must have gone straight to the gas chamber and then to the crematorium, for I never saw him again. We were under guard, because Dr. Schmidt wanted to see us, and I was made to get up, dizzy and weak though I was, and walk through this hall where—where there were bodies, naked and dead and filthy, being searched by another prisoner team. Not just for external items like wedding rings. Every orifice a valuable could be hidden— mouths, ears, vaginas, anuses—as I walked past, they even split open someone's stomach, to see if he had swallowed his gold.

"After that it was almost a relief to enter Doctor Schmidt's office, even if Mother was made to wait outside. It was so clean, so tidy, with the little comforts and elegancies of life all around. He spoke to me kindly and offered me chocolate. What he wanted was for me to do again what I had done at the gates.

"And I tried. I didn't know how I'd done it, it had just happened. So he had my mother brought in, and a gun put to her head, and told me to try harder. She was pleading, trying to reassure me that everything was all right, all right. And he was such a pleasant man.

"Until he told the guard to shoot her. I couldn't make my power work to save my mother's life—but her death woke it again. Schmidt was mightily pleased at that. It is of no use to tell me that he would likely have had her killed afterward anyway. I could not, I did not, save her.

"After that, I was his lab rat, his pupil, his servant, and his dog. The other inmates had to subsist on soup made of water with some nettles stewed in it—nettles are a weed you pull up and throw away, or else feed to your donkey, and they threw it in the kettles whole, not chopped, and didn't stir it when they served it, so unless you were last in line, all you got was a bowl of dirty water. I, though, I feasted every meal, on whatever Schmidt left on his plate—potato jackets dripping with butter, bones with meat and gristle left on them—he didn't like raw tomatoes, so I always got those.

"He liked conversation when he ate, so he used to lecture me on wine if he dined alone, and if he had a mistress there he'd lecture her. They were always cast from the same mould as that Emma Frost, blonde and very fair-skinned, for all of his talk about how appearance was unimportant.

"And then—then one day he left. Disappeared. The tide had turned against Germany, everyone knew it but no one dared speak of it So he left, leaving me behind. I melted into the general prison population—things were getting lax by then—and waited for him to come back. I waited too long, in fact, because I grew too weak to use my powers, from lack of nourishment. Finally I gave up on his return, and smashed a guard's head in with a billet of wood when his back was turned. He was supposed to be watching a weak point in the fence, but someone else had gotten too close, and his attention was taken up by screaming at them.

"So I slipped out through the hole, and then—then the someone who he'd been abusing followed after me. That was Magda, although at the age she was and in the state she was, you would have been hard put to tell if she were young or old, boy or girl. I was no better—a pair of stringy skeletons. That was how we escaped."

"How had she survived?" Joon-Yi asked, quietly.

"I don't know—that was an unspoken rule between us, that we never talked of the camp. If I had to guess, I'd say—thief and informant. I didn't save her on purpose, I attacked then because I wanted to get out, but there she was, and—we stuck together. Eventually we wound up in an agrarian commune where they needed more farm labor, and there we stayed, working among them, putting on flesh, getting better. I was pretending to be human then. I didn't use my powers, except once or twice to fix a plow or some other implement in secret. I wanted to live right.

"Then one day I turned around, and Magda was beautiful. Very beautiful. Then what had been chance began to seem like fate. Were we not meant for each other? Was this not love born out of sorrow and tragedy?

"Besides, we were both outsiders among the villagers. Everyone else had ties going back decades, centuries. Who else were we going to marry? I was nineteen, she seventeen, and we were in love. Or what passes for it.

"Ten months after we married, Anya was born. You spoke of love at first sight earlier—I tell you, until you become a parent, you don't know what that is. Anya—she had skin like a white peach, and her eyebrows were exactly like my mother's. From the first, she had my heart. She was my flesh and blood, my only living kin, and I vowed nothing of what had scarred our lives would ever touch her.

"We lived there, us three, for several years, and it was a good life. Good enough, anyhow. We nearly always had enough to eat, and I was able to save up some money. You see, I wanted something very badly, and what I hungered for was not to be bought in that little commune. An education."

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><p>AN: A difficult chapter to write. More soon. I have taken/am going to take a few liberties with Erik's back story. As I said in an earlier note, there will be no Pietro or Wanda, and there will be a few other details changed.


	30. Confession and Absolution

Erik paused. His heart pounded in his chest, his throat, his ears. Why divulge all this to her, when he had kept it locked in a secret strongbox of memory for so many years? And why continue, when what he had to confess would surely drive off any woman, much less one he had any thought of marrying?

…because he loved Joon-Yi, he realized. Perhaps twenty hours had gone by since he had pulled himself up on the deck of the Caspartina and first heard a cool, calm voice questioning Schmidt about his preparations, and then saw who it came from. Falling in love as an adult was nothing as dream-like or magical as the love-at-first-sight Raven and Hank shared, or as he had known it with Magda, it was not happy-making or blissful. It was confusing as hell, it made you angry and it made you frightened.

Suddenly she was necessary, like air or food, and anything might happen to her, she might get sick and die, she might be hit by a car or be murdered, she might fall in love with someone else or simply…not feel as he did. Never mind what she had said of the future. Who knew if it would happen that way anyhow?

Better to drive her away now than to draw it out. He would tell her, and he would tell her the truth. "When I think of how I live now," he said, indicating the fine leather jacket and cashmere turtleneck he wore, the hand-tooled shoes and the well-tailored pants, "and that what I spent on these clothes alone would have kept us three for a year—what an irony! Had I not been trying to be human, to live as a human…it does not matter. It was ten years ago. Anya would be fourteen now, had she lived. Half your age, which is odd to think of. In my mind she will always be four."

"We don't stop loving people just because they die," Joon-Yi said, quietly. "or are otherwise…gone. The love we feel for them—I think of it as crystallizing, freezing the way it is. Suspended animation. Did you have no other children?"

"No. I don't know why not. Well, after Anya was born, of course it wasn't like it was when we were first married, but that's normal. Matters were never so bad between us that we weren't…not until the move to the city. It was I who wanted to make a change so badly; Magda was content enough in the commune. All of this, of course, is my version of matters. No doubt Magda would tell it differently, had she been the one who lived, that we were perfectly happy as we were and it was all my mad folly.

"But we were not perfectly happy. We got along well enough while there was plenty of work. In an agrarian commune, there is little time or energy for deep philosophical discussions or long walks in nature, even if one is so inclined. But there were signs that something more serious was wrong, and I did not see them or understand them when I saw them."

He turned away, not wanting to see Joon-Yi's face when it changed, and he knew it would change. He wanted to say, _I know you better already than I knew Magda after five years of marriage. I am more married to you at this moment than I ever was to her_. However, with what he had to recount, those statements would be more likely to frighten her than charm her. Perhaps they would be frightening under any circumstances. Too much, too soon.

He heard a clunk, and then another, metal against metal, and his sense for metal told him her prosthetic arms lay discarded on the ground. Then—Joon-Yi's arms around him, from behind, her real arms, unseen but strong, and her head rested against his back, an embrace in reverse. He drew in a ragged breath.

"Keep talking," she said.

"From the start, I would come home at the end of the day," he told her, "to find Anya crying or dirty or hungry. Quite often, I would come home to find her like that. Or else she would be at a neighbor's or a neighbor would be visiting with her children. Of course, it isn't easy raising a child and keeping house at the same time, not to mention working in the garden and tending the poultry, and after a long day, it would be natural for Magda to be tired. Now and then I would find her sitting in a chair just watching Anya cry herself out, doing nothing about it, even when something was obviously wrong. But I always managed to put Anya to rights in no time, and—there was never a suspicious mark on her. Never. And yet—.

"The neighbor women often remarked at how good a father I was, and how lucky Anya was to have a Poppa like me. No one ever remarked at how good a mother Magda was. This I saw in retrospect. Remember, I was young and rather thoughtless with it."

"There is a condition called post-partum depression," Joon-Yi said, a little muffled by his back. "It's poorly understood. If a mother doesn't bond with her baby—mine abandoned me. At least she did so in a place where they believed even my life was sacred."

"Whatever it was, until we left for the city, there wasn't an obvious problem in either our marriage or between Anya and Magda.

"But once we left the commune, the cracks began to show. You see, it wasn't as easy to find work as I had hoped—yes, I was young, strong, healthy and willing, but so were any number of other men, and they had family connections, union contacts, or some other such social network that I, as a newcomer, did not. The money melted away faster than I had anticipated, and we argued, as you might expect."

"Was there no work for Magda either?" Joon-Yi asked.

"Merely one of the things we fought about. At the time, we had a furnished room, one room for the three of us. Not a large room, either, and we shared a washroom with all the other families in the building, one bathroom for perhaps twenty families. So there was hardly any housework to be done, and I suggested she might take in sewing if she didn't want to go out to work. Something, anything. But she claimed she had to look after Anya, and who would give her sewing? She knew no one either. What truly enraged me one day was when I came back to find her out and Anya alone, finger painting all over the walls with greasy soot from the chimney. Magda said she'd only gone down to use the toilet, but there was a lot of soot spread about for that to be the case.

"Then one day, I managed to get hired as a day laborer. I doubt I ever worked so hard on a single day in my life, since I hoped that would lead to more work. Yet after all my effort, the foreman paid me less than half what I was promised, and I—I was furious. He laughed and said it was his cut. My powers—again, I had been trying not to use them, pretending I was human. A crowbar leapt up and pinned him to the wall by his miserable neck, and I had not consciously commanded it. It did scare him into paying me the balance, though.

"So I went back to our tenement, troubled as to the future. What if the foreman put the word out not to hire me, what then? Only when I got there, there was smoke coming from the windows of our building, and a small crowd gathered in the street. I bumped into Magda among them. She had a marketing basket on her arm. 'Thank God—where's Anya?' was what I said.

" 'She was napping so soundly, I went out to buy something for our supper,' " she said.

" 'You left her there—did you lock the door?'

" 'Yes—.' That was all she had the chance to say, because then the foreman and his friends found me. With a fire raging on the same street and people screaming, all they were intent on was beating me into a pulp. With wooden clubs, too, over which I had no control. I could _hear_ Anya crying out for me_. _

"Then there was a—a bright flare, and my head felt as though it were coming apart. And then—silence, but for the crackle of flames, and other random sounds, like liquid dripping. No human sounds at all.

"I was in the center of a piecemeal fort of metal, everything from as far as my powers could reach, everything of a size my powers could draw in. Metal railings, pots, light fixtures, an old stove, all bent, distorted, and wet. There were…other things caught up in it too. Pulpy, red things. I was covered in blood, and not all of it was mine. I opened the fort so I could get out, only to discover that I had pulled the metal through whatever was in the way. Windows everywhere were shattered, some walls were partly collapsed—and there were a lot of bodies. The foreman had been cut in half. His henchmen were shredded, the on-lookers mangled and, and Magda was among them.

"I had killed them. I had killed them all. I killed…my wife. I killed Magda."

Joon-Yi had held still through all of that, growing stiffer and stiffer. Now she let go of him, and he could not bear to turn and look.

"You don't," she began, sounding nothing like herself. Her voice wavered and broke as she went on to say, "You don't leave a four year old alone to go shopping. Everybody knows that. I don't care how well she's sleeping, you just don't… You either wait until she wakes up on her own or you put up with the cranky , wake her and take her along. She could have started the fire herself, alone like that."

That was not the reaction he was expecting, but very likely it had not all sunk in as yet. She continued, "I—if I had left my child with my spouse and come back home to find he'd gone shopping and left our child to burn to death, I—couldn't live with him another hour. Not ever again. I think—I think I'd try and smash his face in. Somebody would have to keep me off of him…what happened then?"

"I found Anya's body, wrapped it in my jacket, and left that place before people beyond the devastation responded. I ran, in other words, pausing only to bury her in a place far from the eyes of men. From that hour until—yesterday, I have lived only to find Schmidt and kill him, with no thought of what might follow. So there it is. I failed my mother. I failed my daughter. I killed my wife. Now you know."

"I think—," Joon-Yi started, "I think you might have left Auschwitz, but you didn't escape it. You only left it, and it hasn't left you."

"No," he agreed. "Instead, the whole world is Auschwitz. Everywhere I go, I take it with me."

"I don't know how to make this better. Nothing I say or do can make this okay for you," she said, and he could hear that she was crying. "Nothing's adequate. I can't _do_ anything. Oh, why am I so _bad_ at this? But, I don't know, this is stupid and it will probably make things worse, but, but I can speak for your mother. And for your daughter. I don't know what Magda would say, but I know what they would say. No, don't look at me, don't look at my face.

"Your mother would say, 'Erik, I love you. I forgave you long ago for not saving me. I am glad you survived, because while you live, I live in you. The heart in your chest is the heart that beat under mine when I carried you. But your hurting hurts me, and your anger frightens me. I beg you to let it go, and strive to be happy.'

"Anya would say, ' Poppa, I love you better than anything in the world. I forgive you for not saving me. I'm glad you're alive. Now—now _you_ forgive you too.'" With the last words, she swept her arms around him again, holding him close, holding him tight, and for that moment, she was his wife, she was his mother, she was his daughter, she was every woman he had ever loved and ever would.


	31. Snogging

Joon-Yi: I shall not commit what Erik said to me on that walk to this journal, nor what I said in return. I shall not forget, not in a week, a year, a lifetime, and on the off chance that someone bright does some day decipher this journal, I will not have his private tragedy cheapened by other eyes.

Yet it does raise the question of what is it that goes so wrong that Mr. Magnussen winds up estranged from his living children. Whatever it is, it seems to be a multigenerational rift, as they won't have good relationships with their children either. At the time, I wondered what could possibly have happened that was so bad that they never called or even sent him cards.

There were rumors that Magneto was the father of at least three children, but who they might be, and who their mother is (or their mothers are, for there may be more than one baby mama)—was always a mystery. He only mentioned one wife, long dead, although there is of course the 'long term relationship'—Mystique. Maybe _they_ had children together. At this moment, I would say that Raven is way too young for him.

Yes, I know that having a sociopathic mutant terrorist for a father would be awkward to explain when asked what daddy does for a living, but I know what kind of father Erik would make, at least right now. He'd be overprotective, but he'd love them like nothing else on earth.

But that's Erik. Magneto…is another story. In, say, ten years time, when he is entrenched in the Brotherhood, when the cycle of attempt and failure, of escalation and attack, has gone through several cycles, he will be the Magneto who I studied, who I wrote about. That man would regard children as encumbrances when small and as pawns in the game when grown. Everything he did, every aspect of his life was dedicated to the Cause.

Well, I know one cheap and easy way I could change at least some aspect of history. I could marry him. After hearing about what I will not put down on paper, I was sorely tempted to say yes, and we should get started on a family _right now_. But I'm not so naive. Right now I'm befuddled by lust, not to mention that my sympathy is overexcited, and the combination is dangerous for all concerned.

* * *

><p>Charles realized the noise in Raven's room had died down and stopped some time ago. From the window, he could see Joon-Yi sitting on a bench outdoors, bent over a book. It was dark out and she was sitting in the pool of light under a lamp post, quite intent on whatever it was. He decided to go out and meet her. Strolling out, he found she was not reading it, but rather, writing it.<p>

"Ah—do you keep a journal?" he asked, glancing at it. It was written in a foreign script. Korean, probably, although he would not have been able to tell by looking.

"'One should always have something sensational to read on the train,'" she said in a silky British accent.

" The Importance of Being Earnest!" he said. "What sorts of things do you keep track of?"

"Snogging," she said.

"Oh. Do, uh, you kiss a lot of men?"

"Just kidding," she said. "Not really."

"But why do your writing out here after dark?" he asked, waving a hand at the night landscape.

"Our rooms don't have windows, and that bugs me a little. So—what can I do for you tonight?" She closed the journal on the pen and put it aside.

"Well—is there anything going on with Raven I ought to know about?"

"Yes." Joon-Yi shifted to make room for him on the seat. "Please, sit down and be comfortable."

He did, and she went on to say, "What I'm going to tell you goes back straight to my dad and something he said to my brother once. We used to go to the Poconos in the summertime, where we had this cabin in the woods, an old hunting cabin. It belonged to my dad's dad, back in the day. Anyhow, it being summer, we'd go to this mine hole that was all filled up with water to go swimming. I was about seven, my brother was fourteen, and he had these friends he hung out with. Well, one day, they were talking about this girl who had really developed since last summer. Especially in the chest and butt areas.

"The things they were saying—she was far enough away that she couldn't hear, at least—were lewd and crude. There were obscene gestures involved as well." Joon-Yi wasn't equipped to make hand gestures, but she did poke her cheek out with her tongue as illustration.

"I had no idea what they were talking about, but because I'd never heard talk like that before, I asked what certain things meant in the car on the way home. My dad nearly blew a gasket. Quietly, because he was a quiet kind of man, but he told my brother he was disappointed in him, and—I can't describe it, but the way he said 'I am disappointed in you' could reduce any one of us to tears. He just had this intensity… He also said, 'Your little sister watches everything you do and listens to everything you say. When she's around, you need to talk about and act toward girls the way you would want guys to act toward her.' Now, you're not fourteen and Raven isn't seven, but when you act like all you're looking for is an easy lay—."

"Oh," he said, and rubbed his hand over his face to cover his embarrassment. "Oh, dear."

"—then she gets the message that's all a guy wants, and that to have a guy be interested in her—. I'm not saying you can't have casual sex. Just don't make casual hook-ups in front of her. As long as you use protection and make it latex, because viruses walk right through sheepskin condoms, go to it and have fun. Don't forget the spermicidal lubricant, because condoms do break sometimes and according to Raven, you're well-off. The last thing you want is to get slapped with a paternity suit. Not to mention turning your genes loose on the population without considering the consequences."

"How do I undo what harm I've already done?" he asked, knowing his face was red. "With Raven I mean." He had been a little irresponsible with his genes already. Not as much as he would have liked, but still…

"Just what I've said—let her see you acting toward other women the way you'd want men to treat her. Look, I know you are a good and honorable man, because with _your_ powers, you could very easily be a monster, especially where women are concerned, and they'd never even know. Just let that aspect of you show more—and lose that line about groovy mutations."

"All right. I shall. Ummm… is there anything else?"

"Yes. Your wardrobe. I think you ought to go for a 'decadent young aristocrat' look. A velvet frock coat, not red or black, they're clichés. Bottle green or cognac brown, with a ruffled white shirt. You could really rock that look."

He laughed. "Do you ever get whiplash from changing gears so quickly?"

"Me? Nah." she scoffed. "Although—hey. You're not that into me, and I'm not that into you, we've established that, right?"

"You mean, in terms of being attracted to each other?" he queried.

"Yes," she replied.

"That's about right, I should say."

"Is there anyone around, and I mean _anyone_? Anyone watching us?" She scooted closer on the bench.

"No, not so much as a raccoon." He wondered what she was getting at.

"Then, purely as an experiment, would you mind kissing me?"

"What? Kiss you?"

"Yes." She nodded.

"But—why?"

"Like I said. As an experiment. Knowing it means nothing to either of us."

"Ah. Yes. All right." He leaned forward.

Charles Xavier was not the most experienced man, but neither was he the least. The kiss that followed was…well, it wasn't earth-shaking, but if he'd met her in a pub somewhere and they'd had a quick snog, he'd definitely have made sure to get _this_ bird's telephone number.

When it was over, she sat back and said, "I'd put that up there with the chocolate-in-foil kind," but she didn't sound especially impressed.

"I think I could do better," he offered. "I was caught off-guard."

"No, that's okay," she replied. "I'm good." Standing up, she brushed at her skirt and retrieved her journal.

"If you ever change your mind, my lips are here," he joked. Joon-Yi might be as much trouble as an entire Mongolian horde, he hadn't changed his mind about that, but she had her good qualities too. Not just soft warm lips, but a keen sense of fun, and one could have real conversations with her. _She_ hadn't gone to college to major in Husband Hunting.

Suddenly it seemed like maybe he had missed out on something. "I am sorry I recoiled when I first noticed." he said. He had something to make amends for there too.

"It's okay," she smiled. "No hard feelings here. Good night." She disappeared back inside the building.

Left alone, Charles bit his lip thoughtfully and kicked at the gravel on the ground around the bench. He had some thinking to do.

* * *

><p>AN: After the last several chapters, especially the last one, it was hard to change gears, and I don't know how I could top 'Confession and Absolution', to judge by reader reaction. Many thanks to Aislynn, Trickster, Penguinsnuggles, scrapbullet, and Taylor for their reviews. To hear that I've come up with an OC even OC haters enjoy reading is the second highest possible comment, right behind hearing that I've moved you emotionally.

Since several people have wondered, the story about Anya and Magda is canon up until Magda's death. In the comicverse, she runs off from Erik, terrified by his powers, (although he never hurt or threatened her) and finds her way to Wundagore Mountain, home to the previously mentioned artificially evolved farm animals. There she gives birth to Pietro and Wanda before deliberately going out into a blizzard to die. I think that shows both mental illness and a complete inability to bond with her children, which I explored in the last chapter.

And don't worry. This is not going to turn into a love triangle. Joon-Yi just wanted to see if kissing Charles was as intense as kissing Erik. Answer: no. Charles hasn't fallen for Joon-Yi either. This is more about him coming to see women as people rather than as sex objects. Nor was it witnessed; no angry scenes with a jealous Erik or a jealous Raven are upcoming.


	32. Teasing

The knock on the door came when Erik was only half dressed. "Who is it?" he called.

"Joon-Yi," was the reply. "I have a favor to ask you for, if it isn't too much trouble."

"Come in," he said, opening the door, but when she saw him she stopped.

"You better finish getting dressed first," she told him, "before something happens to your pants."

He looked down. "What would happen to my pants?"

"Me," she warned him, with a quirky smile.

"That's hardly going to inspire me to get dressed any quicker! " he said. "The opposite, in fact." Hearing her talk like that was a little shocking and more than a little intriguing.

"Nevertheless, I'm staying on this side of the threshold until _you_ are fully clothed," she said firmly, crossing her artificial arms with a clash of metal. Today she wore a sleeveless crimson dress (there was probably a specific name for it, of which he was ignorant) over a black blouse and tights, her sleek hair pulled back by a crimson band. The adhesive eye patch had been replaced by one on an elastic cord.

"I wouldn't do anything you didn't want me to," he assured her, reaching into the bureau drawer for fresh socks.

"That's the problem," she muttered.

"What was that?" he asked.

"Oh, you heard me," she said, casting him a dark glance.

"I have a solution. We could get married now, and continue getting to know each other better afterward. Maryland has no waiting period, I'm told. We could make a side trip on the way to the airport. What do you think of that?" he inquired, sitting down on the bed to put on socks and shoes.

"If you aren't careful, I will marry you," she told him, still leaning against the corridor wall. "And then you'll be in for it."

He chuckled. "How so?"

"Because I'll be forthright at every opportunity, and if you need to be smacked upside the head or kicked in the ankle for being a dumbass, I'll do it."

Again, he chuckled. "I'm looking forward to it."

"Ah, you say that now, but just wait until I cut loose on _you_."

"Do your worst," he invited her.

"Plus, that business in the vows about 'love, honor and obey'? 'Obey' is out of the question. I could never obey anyone's orders against my better judgment, and I have to say I have a pretty high opinion of my own judgment."

"I wouldn't have you any other way." he told her.

"Hah. Again, you say that _now_. Just wait...Plus wherever we'd settle down, it would have to be on a waterfront, and I'm talking serious waterfront. A simple swimming pool isn't going to cut it."

He pulled out a fresh turtleneck. "Saltwater or fresh?"

"Oh—either or. I'm not completely unreasonable."

"Then I know just the place," he said. "What do you say to a private island in the Bermudas? Mind you, it has no modern amenities at the moment. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, I believe the expression is." There really was an island which he had discovered in his travels, right in the center of the Bermuda Triangle, waiting to be raised back up from under the waves. He was looking forward to seeing the expression on her face when she found out.

"Aren't most first homes?" she countered, then laughed. "Seriously, though."

"Yes, seriously," he said. "After yesterday- -do you think people meet and find such mutual understanding, so much chemistry, such compatibility every day?" Erik slipped the shirt over his head and smoothed it down.

"No," Joon-Yi said, looking down at the floor. "I don't think that. But until November twenty-second has come and gone, I don't think I can give you an answer. I can't commit myself to a future until I have _some_ idea of what that future's going to be...We could try going off for a weekend somewhere together, to see if that would be enough to get each other out of our systems." Her voice, as she made the offer, was very quiet, very steady.

He shook his head. "I'm greedy. I don't want a weekend. I want everything. I want the rest of your life. If you ever doubt I am an honorable man, remember that I didn't take you up on that."

"I didn't think that would work anyway. I'm not a casual sort of person...Have you been celibate for the last ten years?" She flushed up as she asked the question.

"The questions you ask! Emotionally, yes, more barren than any desert. Physically, no. Not always. I haven't picked up any diseases or left any children anywhere, if that's what you want to know."

"That covers it, yes." she said.

"What about you? At twenty-eight, you must have some history."

"Some, yes," she half-smiled. "You'd be surprised if I repeated to you some of the propositions I've gotten—but they aren't what you'd call history, as such. Let's say I was able to speak with authority last night when I told Raven that when you're afraid no one will ever want you, the first one who does will be a dyed-in-the-wool jerk, because jerks can smell desperation like that a mile off.

"However, it doesn't mean your life is ruined forever, and the important thing is to avoid picking up either a disease or a baby. Both of which I did avoid, and other than a couple of near misses, dates that went nowhere, I've nothing else to tell. I cried more when my elderly friend died than I ever did over the jerk. Now," Joon-Yi stepped inside, "I did have a favor I was going to ask you for- -."

A wave of his power shut the door behind her, and he backed her up against it, kissing her. She made a hungry little sound in the back of her throat, kissing him back. Then she abruptly bent her knees, slithering out of his arms.

"This is why I shouldn't be alone with you!" She righted herself several feet away

"No," he disagreed, "this is why you _should_. At any rate, what is the favor?"

"It's very difficult to find good quality tea in America. All I can get in supermarkets is orange pekoe in teabags, which is hardly any better than floor sweepings. Too much tannin, not enough flavor. Since you and Charles are going to be out and around in airports and places, I was hoping you could pick up some loose leaf black tea for me. I could give you some cash up front if you prefer, or we could settle up once you get back."

"Just some tea? You needn't pay me back. What kinds do you want?" Erik asked.

"Ah!" she perked up. "I made a list. Here."

She handed him a folded slip of paper. The significant glance she gave it and then to him said more than her words did. He unfolded it to read:

'_We ought to have a confidential way to check in with each other, and since this is a CIA base the phones are anything but confidential. I worked out a code to tell each other what's really going on. Since you're the one traveling, it would make sense for you to be the one to call. Eight o'clock or so every night? Earlier or later if convenient._

_**Assam:**__ Everything's great. A strong, malty black tea._

_**Darjeeling:**__ Bored out of my mind. Am going to strangle Charles/Raven if this keeps up. The champagne of teas, slightly astringent but refreshing._

_**Ceylon:**__ No meaning, I just really like this tea. Delicate, with a hint of honey. _

_**Chai:**__ The natives are restless. Suspicious activity from the CIA, but nothing I can't handle. An Indian tea blended with strong spices, prepared boiled with milk._

_**Lapsang Souchong:**__ Making a break for it along with Charles/Raven. A smoky tea with a hint of iron, not for the novice._

_**Puh-Er:**__ Am under duress right now, need immediate assistance. A tea with the unsubtle flavors of dead fish, soap, and dirty gym socks. Don't know why anybody drinks it.'_

He read it over, gave her a glance. "Puh-Er?"

"That one's on the list because I _don't_ want it, but you probably won't ever come across it. The name means 'Camel Breath'." she said.

"Say no more. I've been around camels. This seems quite straightforward. I'll keep this on me." Erik took out his wallet, folded the paper up again, and slipped it inside. "What are you and Raven going to do while we're gone?"

"Oh, as long as there's something to read around, I'm perfectly content. Plus there are all the laboratories. We didn't even see the Genetic Research division yesterday. It's Raven you need to be concerned about. The truth is, she's only ever been home-schooled. Charles basically found her raiding his refrigerator one night when she was very young, and hid her in the house like—like a kid hiding a stray kitten from a parent with allergies. Nobody ever knew she was there because she either imitated him or he clouded things with his telepathy. He taught her from his books. She's never been to school, at least not since she was five or six, and so she has no idea of what she wants to do with her life."

"And now she's twenty-one and something's got to give," Erik summed up. "Shall we join the others?"

* * *

><p>AN: Yes, Magneto does have a secret island base in the Bermuda Triangle, built by who knows who eons ago, but whoever it was had a thing for octopi and other ocean life and expressed it in the architecture. Kind of Lovecraftian, partly Disney's Little Mermaid. Depends on whether tentacles squick you out or not.

A short fun chapter to let you know where things stand between them right now. The next one will be Charles and Erik out recruiting.


	33. Roll Over, Beethoven

Disclaimer: I own nothing, especially not the characters or the song lyrics referred to in this chapter, and I am not getting paid for this.

* * *

><p>"Which one?" Erik asked as they paused in the entrance to the Kitty-Kat Luv Klub.<p>

"Hmmm—_That_ one. The dancer on the table there," Charles nodded in her direction.

Erik looked. "Her? You propose recruiting for our group, which at this moment consists of ourselves, your innocent sister, a Harvard-educated scientific prodigy, and an omnivorously literate pharmacologist— to that group, you want to add a stripper? What are the chances she finished high school, much less went to college?"

"She's probably a perfectly nice girl," Charles defended himself. "She certainly looks perfectly nice from here."

"To my eye she looks a trifle shopworn," Erik commented, because she did. He was looking at her face, not at her round thighs or overflowing brassiere. (Which took some effort. She was well qualified for the job.) Makeup was trying to do the work of sleep and not quite succeeding.

"I see no such thing," his friend replied. "And until quite recently, Joon-Yi was working as a cocktail hostess in a costume not much more modest than that, by her own admission. Mutants are likely to come from any and all walks of life. You know that."

"I don't dispute any of that," Erik glanced at him. "But I'll lay you any money that if that girl accepts, she'll also be the first to quit. She won't fit in."

"Well, they can't all be like Hank and Joon-Yi, that's just not realistic. This girl might not be my first choice—."

"Actually, she _is_ your first choice. This is the first venue we've tried." Erik pointed out.

"_Thank _you, Erik."

"Don't mention it."

Charles restrained a sigh. "She may have more in common with the others we want to recruit. Come on, let's make her acquaintance."

The bill Erik held up was enough to get her to saunter over, all shimmery fringes and sinuous undulations. Up close, her eyes were hard, and there was something slightly coarse about her, the coarseness that came from dissipation. But did the tattoos across her shoulders and back have a three dimensional quality to them?

She bent down, graceful as a swaying willow, to take it from his hand. When she saw the denomination, she smirked. "For that, Daddy-o, you get a private dance."

She led them to a booth curtained in red velvet, where they could lounge on a bed like a pair of degenerated Roman emperors while she gyrated. The champagne was Krug—the Klub did its guests well, if they could pay. The men clinked glasses.

Before she began to move, she paused. "You cats know it's double for both, right?" Those flat dark eyes said that she'd seen it all—a girl no older than Raven, with the eyes of a forty-year-old.

"Um. No, thanks, that won't be necessary. Although I'm sure it would be magic," Charles began.

"We were thinking more like—we'll show you ours, and you show us yours," Erik cut in.

"Baby, that is not the way it works around here," she informed him.

Clicking his fingers, he made the champagne bucket float up and over to Charles. "More tea, Vicar?"

"Don't mind if I do," the telepath replied. The girl finally showed a spontaneous, genuine reaction—shock and amazement crossed her face.

"My turn," she smiled, reaching up behind her shoulder blades to undo her bra. The tattoo peeled off her skin, showing an iridescent film between the outlines, and her wings stretched out, first fluttering and then blurring. She rose several inches off the floor, hovering there.

The men exchanged glances. "How would you like a job where you get to keep your clothes on?" Charles asked.

* * *

><p>Left alone in the new mutant dormitory, Raven and Joon-Yi holed up, not in the common room, which was too unfamiliar to be their territory yet, but in Joon-Yi's room, where they were talking.<p>

"I understand about hiding. Up until—well, less than a year ago, I was practically a completely different person on the outside. I wore the drabbest, most shapeless clothes I could find, I kept my head down and never made eye contact if I had to. I hardly spoke above a whisper—basically I went through life trying to be invisible. Not because of these," Joon-Yi clacked her hooks together, "but because almost anybody could pick me up and break me into pieces if they wanted."

"So what changed for you?" Raven sipped her cola and tried to imagine her friend the way she described herself. It wasn't easy.

"I went off my meds and my powers finally kicked in. I used to be a mouse, and now I'm a dragon. Before, my biggest excitement was a weekly chess game (not that I didn't enjoy it.) Now I'm caught up in a life of international intrigue and adventure, complete with spies, secret agents, and men so handsome movie stars would shirk at being in the same room with them—and _so __are __you_."

Raven had been about to say something like 'Yes, but _you're_ beautiful'. It could not be denied that she, too, was involved, so instead she said, "Yeah, but right now we're both stuck on base while the guys are off adventuring."

"True. That does suck. We'll just have to make our own entertainment. I think this calls for being as silly as possible. Maximum ridiculousity." Joon-Yi kicked off her shoes and sprang up on the bed, taking her pop bottle with her. "I'll go first."

"What?" Raven laughed.

"This," her friend proclaimed, "is not a bed. It's a stage. Out there are twenty thousand fans, waiting with breathless anticipation for the show to begin. The lights come up. The first chords start—." A couple of pencils began beating time on the desk, a ruler tapped rhythmically on an empty trash can.

Throwing back her head, Joon-Yi sang, with perfect confidence (but hardly a perfect voice), using the soda bottle for a microphone, "My mama told me when I was young, 'We are all born superstars—."

Her singing voice was…okay. Raven thought. Joon-Yi was never meant to be a professional singer, but she could carry a tune and she sang with feeling and expression, with all the gestures of a performer. "—I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby, I was born this way!" There were lyrics about loving your friends and being yourself, but it always came back to that affirmation.

It was like nothing Raven had ever heard—catchy, the kind of tune that could easily get stuck in your head all day. And yes, it was silly and even shallow, but it was also bold and fun. Joon-Yi finished, bowed and waved to her nonexistent audience and thanked them before hopping off the stage-er, bed.

"_What_ was _that_?" Raven asked her.

"Just a song I heard a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's pure pop, just like this," Joon-Yi took a swig of her soda, "sugary and no good for you, but it's also bubbly and tastes good. So—now it's your turn. But quit being so pink and gold first, it's annoying me."

"What? You want me to get up there and do that too?"

"Uh-huh. Same song and everything. And do it as _you._We're all alone here, so cut loose. Maximum ridiculosity, remember?" Raven nearly refused, but—Joon-Yi had looked like she was having fun and they were alone. Plus Joon-Yi's attitude was contagious.

"But I only heard it once," Raven said, half-heartedly, wanting to be talked into it.

"You, who can copy everything about a person in one glance, and you're saying you didn't pick up one little song? Up, up!" Joon-Yi made shooing motions.

Raven got up, shifted into her blue form, and stepped up on the bed, complete with soda bottle microphone. "My mamma told me—."

"Not such a little voice," Joon-Yi insisted. "Belt it out like you mean it, girl!"

"We are all born superstars—." At first a bit self-conscious, the fun of it grew on her, and she stopped even paying attention to Joon-Yi, until she was done, of course. Then she caught her friend with the strangest look on her face.

"Was I okay?" she asked. "It was your idea."

"You out- Ga-ga-ed Ga Ga." Joon-Yi said.

"What, I was so bad you're babbling?" Raven shifted back to blonde.

"No, you were that _good_! I got goosebumps listening to you, see? I am not making fun of you and I'm not exaggerating. With your abilities, _of __course_ you'd have the perfect physical vocal instrument. You are—Wait here. This is the CIA, they've got to have endless recording devices around here. You need to hear yourself!"

* * *

><p>"You know," Charles said conversationally, "There's something about you, Erik, that's altered, just since yesterday. You seem more at ease."<p>

"Do I?" Erik asked. "Perhaps it's your good influence. Which one is it we're looking for?"

"He's nearby and getting closer—It may be someone's good influence, but I'm not so sure it's mine. Ah. The cab driver, the one pulling in right now."

"And I see he'll be fighting for his civil rights on two fronts if he accepts," Erik observed, seeing that the cabbie was black. "Recalling the diner yesterday, is this a fair burden to put on him?"

"We're only asking. He can say no, if he chooses."

They got in the cab. "Where to, fellas?" asked the cabbie, who was young and had interesting planes to his face.

"Richmond, Virginia, please," Erik told him.

"Okay, so you want the airport, the station, or what?"

"We were rather hoping you would take us all the way," Charles said.

"But—that's a six hour drive." And one with no prospect of a return passenger, too.

"That should give us time to talk." Erik tripped the meter remotely, which was not lost on the driver.

* * *

><p>"So what should I sing? 'Born This Way' again?" Raven asked. They were crammed into Joon-Yi's bathroom, because, as all shower divas know, bathrooms offer the best acoustics. Raven was consequently standing in the tub, while Joon-Yi sat on the closed toilet, and the rest of the floor space was taken up by a cart with a huge tape recorder on it.<p>

"No, let's try something more familiar to most people. How about 'Roll over, Beethoven'?" Joon-Yi pressed a couple of buttons on the machine, which squealed and spun its tape.

"Sure, I know that one." Raven lifted the microphone. "Ready? Now? Okay— 'I'm gonna write a little letter, gonna mail it to my local DJ—."

She ran through it, with Joon-Yi providing percussion with household objects as before. When she was done, she asked, "Well? How did I sound?" because there was a quirky smile playing around her friend's mouth.

"Listen for yourself," Joon-Yi rewound the tape.

It was a perfect rendition of the vocals— only it was in Chuck Berry's voice, complete to every detail.

"Oh, no!" Raven slapped her forehead.

"But you sound great!" Joon-Yi reassured her. "Let's try it again, from the top, only aim for a female voice this time…"

* * *

><p>"Convicted of arson, reckless property damage, and wanton endangerment," Erik said, sotto voce. "Marvelous. Perhaps you were right about the stripper fitting in better with the other new recruits."<p>

"You're not being helpful, Erik," Charles muttered back as the warden unlocked the massive cell door.

"What the hell does the government want with a guy like Alex Summers? I hope you're not planning on putting him in with others. First guy I've ever met who prefers solitary confinement." He slid open the cell door. The young man inside looked up, startled, with the face of a Giotto angel.

* * *

><p>"You need training in the mechanics of singing. Proper breathing, phrasing, breath control, and all that, " Joon-Yi pronounced. "I can't teach you, I only took choir for the arts credit and I never got any solo parts. And I don't play the piano, not that there's one around here anyway. But <em>this<em> is what you ought to be doing, Raven. You have the best voice I've ever heard. This is it. This is how you're going to stop hiding—provided you want to."

"What, by singing? While I'm blue? I don't want to be a freakshow, and I don't know if I want to do this anyhow!" Raven protested, but inside—inside she yearned for Joon-Yi to be right.

"You won't be a freakshow, No more than any other performer. Superstars aren't accepted—they're worshipped. And the most enduring ones are those who can reinvent themselves with every album, every song. Nobody could do that better than you. Listen, you can fight hard for mutant acceptance, for equality. You can fight for decades, blowing up bridges and taking school kids hostage. Or you can fight _smart_. You can be a mutant openly, get paid fantastic sums of money and have thousands of fans, and every time someone mentions that this person or that is a mutant, people will think, 'oh, yeah, like that singer Raven X—."

"Mystique," Raven corrected her. "I'd use that for my stage name. But—what am I talking about. It would never work, and you're kind of freaking me out!"

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to." Joon-Yi backed off literally, wheeling the recorder on its cart out of the restroom. "Heh. I'm doing to you what Erik is doing to me…."

"What?"Raven followed her out of the bathroom. "What's Erik doing to you?"

"Well—let's just say that if I agreed, you and Moira would have been my bridesmaids this morning."

"No way!" Raven exclaimed. "Tell me more! Did you kiss him?"

"Yes."

"And, and!" Raven made 'gimme, gimme' gestures.

"And I was sorely tempted to ignore all that good advice I gave you last night and just go for it," Joon-Yi turned almost as red as her jumper.

"Ohhh! But why didn't you? He's gorgeous! Marry him, I mean."

"Well, like you and my plans to launch you into rock superstardom, it's too much, too soon, too uncertain, and it could go really, really bad, really fast." Joon-Yi slumped down on her bed. "But it would be so _nice_. I didn't say 'no', either. I told him I couldn't give him an answer yet, but I wanted to get to know him better."

"I get it." Raven said, and she did. "Well—I guess I could try taking voice lessons. I don't know if Charles'll let me, though."

Joon-Yi raised her head. "It's almost always easier to get forgiveness than permission. I will pay for the lessons. In fact, if it goes well, I'll bankroll you through your first album."

* * *

><p>The red-haired boy sidled up to a blonde girl who was watching clown fish dart back and forth in the big tank.<p>

"Crazy, huh?" he asked casually, but his voice was still prone to breaking. "You like fish, I like fish too. Maybe we should get a bite sometime, talk about it."

She rolled her eyes. "I'd rather go out with the fish." Turning away, she started to walk off when there was a funny sound behind her.

The boy asked, "These fish?" She turned and looked at—an empty tank. The clownfish had fled en masse. But she wasn't interested enough in either the fish or in him to turn back.

The spurned youth turned back to look into the depths of the tank. Another romantic wipeout…but reflected in the glass were two figures coming toward him. Please, not her father or brothers…

And it wasn't.

* * *

><p>"There's always a music teacher in town who gives private lessons on the side. Teachers are always short of money," Joon-Yi said. "Let's look in the phone book, and tomorrow when I go car-shopping, maybe you can have your first lesson."<p>

Raven nodded. "Sure, I'll give it a try…"

* * *

><p>AN: So the pacing in this chapter is skewed. Raven and Joon-Yi's portions are taking place all in one afternoon, while Charles and Erik's are spread out over several days, giving Raven time to have several lessons before the group is reunited.

Behind on replies, but trying to keep a good pace on chapters posted!


	34. The Butterfly Effect

Buying a car turned out not to be a complicated or drawn-out process, at least not the way Joon-Yi did it. The CIA driver dropped them off at the dealership, they went in and stopped at the counter where Joon-Yi said, "Hi. I'm interested in buying a sportscar. I plan to spend about three thousand dollars and I'm paying cash." Less than an hour later, most of which was spent on a test drive, she was signing the papers on a two-door strawberry red coupe. It was an illustrative lesson on the power of money.

"Do you mind if I ask how you got all that money?" Raven wondered as they drove off the lot. Although Charles was generous and always willing to buy her whatever she wanted or needed, she never had more than pocket money. It was hard not to be a little envious of Joon-Yi's independence.

"I took what I earned at the Hellfire Club and hit the casinos just before I left Vegas. I figured I wasn't coming back, so I left nothing behind. If I didn't bring it, I sold it or gave it away, right down to my goldfish." She glanced over at Raven. "Frankly, I took them for so much, it's a good thing I was leaving town."

"Wow—How did you do that-? Oh, your powers. Of course." Raven reasoned.

"Uh-huh_. I_ think we should all go, as a group, and do Atlantic City some weekend. Now do you mind if I ask _you_ a question?"

"Go ahead." Raven shrugged.

"Why blonde? Your shade of red wouldn't raise an eyebrow with the general population." Joon-Yi stopped for a traffic light.

"Um. Charles thinks this shade of blonde is pretty," Raven explained.

"Ohhhh," her friend exhaled.

"Yeah. I always thought that…someday, we'd get married, because after all, it was only us, alone together. All that would change would be which bed I slept in." Raven bit her lip.

"Ray,—I am sorry, but in my opinion, that wouldn't work out well for you unless you went out and saw the world for a while on your own. Get out of your comfort zone and spread your wings first! That'd give _him_ a chance to grow up, which he _really_ needs to do." Joon-Yi told her. "Was that Third Street or Thrush Street? Urghhh—this eye patch!"

"I think it was Third," Raven turned around to have another look. "Yeah, it was."

"Good. I'm looking for Thrush."

"Joon-Yi?" Raven started. "You know about the future, at least some of it. Do you know what happens to _me_? Because yesterday you said something about blowing up bridges and taking kids hostage…Is that what happens? And if it is, then why bother with singing lessons now?"

"Uh—Yes and no. Damn. I was hoping you missed that. It's complicated—The future as I know it is the way the future happened without my interference. I don't suppose you've ever heard about Chaos Theory, have you?" Joon-Yi asked.

"Actually, I have. Hank was explaining it to me last night when we went for a walk in the woods. He talked about how this Lorenz guy was using a computer to try and recreate weather patterns, but because his computer rounded off to just three points right of the decimal or something, it made everything come out differently."

"Ah. _Those_ woods." Joon-Yi nodded, and flashed a grin at her.

"What, did you and Erik—? When did you have the chance?"

"The first night we came here. Anyway, I'm the points that got rounded off." Joon-Yi grimaced. "I hope I am, anyway. Maybe I've already messed up the outcome enough, I don't know. I wish my vision would reset so I'd know when to stop. But the really bad thing that happens to all mutants down the road is that the humans come up with a cure for mutantcy, once which takes away all powers permanently. Which would be okay if it was purely voluntary, but that's not what happens. They start using it on troublemakers and on children to make sure they don't grow up to be mutants. Once that starts—."

"If that's what happens, I think I'll be out there causing a _lot _of trouble," Raven concluded. "How long do we have until then?"

"Forty-four years."

"But that's plenty of time! Meanwhile, I guess I ought to think about a career. Oh—that was Thrush Street!" Raven pointed behind them.

"Damn it!" Joon-Yi wailed. "Where?"

* * *

><p>There were three criteria Charles was using to pick the mutants they approached. First, they had to be of age. The youngest so far was Sean Cassidy, the oldest (by surmise) , the man who was holed up in the bar they currently approached. Second, they had to be residing in America at the moment, and by strong preference, American. (The CIA had stretched about as far as they were willing to stretch in that respect regarding Erik, the Israeli citizen, and Joon-Yi, undocumented and debatable.) Third, they had to be powerful enough to combat Sebastian Shaw and his people.<p>

The third criterion was difficult to define, but Charles and Erik were trying.

"Hank's feet on their own are not a power," Erik argued. "I would call them a physically manifested trait with functional purpose. His intelligence, I'll grant you, is impressive, but not a uniquely mutant quality. I would put him in no more than the second ranking, along with Angel Salvatore. Raven, to my mind, ranks higher, having more traits. I'll place Armando Munoz on the same tier with her."

"I believe he prefers to be called 'Darwin'." Charles commented.

"Darwin, then. You, Joon-Yi, and myself rank higher still, along with Alex Summers. In terms of sheer destructive force, he may out-do us all, yet he lacks versatility. As he is, he may be as much of a danger to us as he is to our foes. More so, given our proximity."

"He's untrained." Xavier said. "We are all of us works in progress, Erik. You. Me. Alex, Joon-Yi, Raven, Hank—all of us. Life ought to be one long learning process."

He pushed the door to the bar open, and a foul cloud of odors billowed forth—cigar smoke, stale beer, bad whiskey, old grease, partly and fully metabolized beer and whiskey as well (traces of vomit and a hint of urine). In short, it stank.

As did the man they sought, hunched forward over the bar, a cigar in his mouth and a line of empty shot glasses in front of him. He was muscular in the way of a fighter, not a mere bodybuilder. The two friends divided to come up on either side of him.

"Excuse me, I'm Erik Lensherr," Erik introduced himself.

"Charles Xavier," Charles offered.

The man took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to say, "Go fuck yourself."

Charles immediately turned on his heel and left, having had enough of a glimpse into_ his_ mind.

Erik followed. "A pity," he said as they stepped back out into the fresh air. "He was the only one who actually looked as though he could fight."

Behind them, James Logan Howlett, better known later as Wolverine (who did not even know his own full name), looked after the two men, puzzled. Did he know them? Did they know him? His past was a whirlpool of darkness, his future, the same. The brief moment of curiosity passed; he finished his current round, and lifted a finger for the bartender to serve him another.

* * *

><p>The sign painted on the window read <em>The Dumont School of Piano, Dance, and Voice<em>, but it was actually just another row home on a street of row homes. Bright pots of geraniums sat on the porch, making it cheerful and attractive. Joon-Yi parked on the street, turned to Raven and asked. "Ready?"

"No."

"It's _okay_. This isn't Juilliard. It's just a place where families send their daughters in the hope they'll pick up a few ladylike accomplishments. You can do it. And I'm here for either moral or immoral support, whichever one you need."

"I'm going to imitate again, I know I will." Raven put both hands on the dashboard and dug her fingernails in until they stopped turning blue.

"Well, everybody imitates their favorite or the most famous version of a song when they're amateurs, even without knowing it. If you sound exactly like Judy Garland, they'll just think you're a _very good_ imitation. Nobody is going to judge you harshly. You think these folks make a living by ripping into students until they quit? They'll be very supportive, you'll see. And if you're going way off somehow, I'll fiddle with my pendant, so you'll know to pull back. Deep breaths now. Come on."

They got out of the car and made their way up the walk to the door, where a friendly-looking woman opened it. "Hello, are you my two o'clock? Come on in, I'm Irene Dumont." She was slim and pale, with a braid of brown hair down her back, her face freckled like a slice of toast with cinnamon sugar on it. "Which one of you is my victim?" she smiled.

"I—I guess that's me," Raven said. "Raven Xavier."

"And you're the one who made the booking, right? Jenny Song? I wasn't expecting—." she trailed off, awkwardly. She was obviously a very nice, even a kind woman who simply didn't know what to say when faced with someone who was handicapped and of another race.

"It's okay, neither was my mother," Joon-Yi said, smiling to let her know there was no offense. "I'm here because I'm the one who thinks Raven should do this."

"Well, step right this way." She led them past a room where an older woman, obviously her mother, played the piano while another instructor in leotards led a flock of little girls in fluffy tutus around the room, swooping like birds.

The studio was small, just a piano with its bench, a pair of chairs and a music stand. "Raven, I'm going to start you off with some scales to warm up, okay?" She touched the keys. "Like this: 'AaaaAAAAaaaah.' Beginning with middle C."

Raven obeyed, and the notes went up and down, then changed keys. She went up and down, then one higher and up and down again. And again. It didn't take much effort on her part, but the expression on Irene Dumont's face grew puzzled, and she paused in her piano playing. "You've trained before, right?"

"No. Never," she confessed. "I was—privately educated, and my guardian—I never studied music."

"Ah. Let's keep going." Raven complied, until the teacher abruptly held one note. "That note, that note you were just now singing, is F6. That is the highest note in the Queen's arias in Mozart's Magic Flute. Yes, it's possible for someone to hit that without training. But—not to hit that and sound like you sound—I would have said that God doesn't allow it. But—you're doing it. And—nobody trained to that point would gasp like they're running up stairs and heave while they're breathing, like you are. By the time you're trained that much, breathing correctly is second nature. You really haven't trained at all."

It was a statement, not a question. "No. I haven't. Um—would it be better if I sang a song? We worked on 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' last night." she offered, a little desperate. Their 'work' had consisted of getting Raven not to sound exactly like the movie version, with the help of the borrowed tape recorder.

"Okay," Irene Dumont said, looking a little stunned. Obviously it was as familiar to her as to them, as she didn't even bother to look for sheet music.

Raven began. "Somewhere over the rainbow. Way up high-." It was such a familiar song that it wasn't just difficult not to imitate Judy Garland, it was difficult to attach any meaning to the well-worn words, made clichéd and campy with overuse, but…if you thought about them, about the longing for a place where everything was all right, where the world was someplace wonderful—that was something Raven knew very well indeed. She sang it as simply as she could, and kept the corner of her eye on Joon-Yi's pendant, watching for her to start fiddling as a signal.

When she was done, she saw that Irene Dumont was wiping her face. Joon-Yi was wiping her face. The entire class of little girls was there, crowded into the doorway, their instructor and Mrs. Dumont as well, and the adults were crying too. The little girls weren't crying, they were looking up with big wide eyes, and one of them asked, loudly, "Is that you, Dorothy?" Then one started clapping, and the rest followed.

"Okay, that's enough," Mrs. Dumont said after the claps died down. "We have our lesson to get back to, and this young lady has hers. Let's all say thank you to—."

"Miss Xavier." Irene Dumont filled in.

"—to Miss Xavier for her lovely singing."

"Thank you, Mizzavier." the class chorused, and shuffled out.

"Miss Xavier," Irene said, closing the door. "Yes, your friend is right, and you _should_ do this. It would be a crime if you didn't. You have the greatest potential as a singer that I have ever heard, and I will be very glad to do my part in developing it. But you have to learn to walk before you can fly, and now I'm going to teach you how to breathe. Not from the chest as you've been doing, but from the diaphragm, here…"


	35. Chimera

Raven came out of that first lesson on a natural high so euphoric she practically had to be tethered down. "That was so much fun!" she exulted. "I can't wait for tomorrow. I had no idea. Singing! It's like, where has this been all my life?"

"Good," I told her, but inside, I felt an actual physical ache, because she was so happy. Even as I write this, I feel it now. If I can succeed in nothing else, if I can change nothing else, let me win this one. Let Raven have music and fulfillment instead of prison and bitterness. Let there be concert stages and applause instead of futility and betrayal. I will be there for her every step of the way. If she winds up with substance abuse issues, I will get her through them. If she winds up in ill-fated relationships with Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger, I will be there with tissues and ice cream. If she makes a disco album I will grit my teeth and smile, only _let this work_.

Let her be the first mutant superstar, let her rise up on the stage like a Bollywood goddess, blue skinned and beautiful, shining in gold and jewels. She has the talent for it and more. In 2013, they can digitally doctor voices until they sound good, but nobody can fake the vulnerability, the heartache, the passion. She has that in spades.

This could be the other way of doing things I've been searching for, the way that isn't violence or placation. After all, this is the beginning of the Golden Age of Pop. The Beatles are cutting their teeth as performers in seedy nightclubs in Berlin. All the millions of Baby Boomers, stifled and overparented and longing to break free, are getting into their teens and if Raven—if _Mystique_ can capture their hearts and their imaginations, then being a mutant will be cool and enviable.

If I win this one, it might mean we all win. Humans, mutants, everybody.

Anyhow, back to Thrush Street, where I was searching through my purse for my keys. I stepped out from under a tree and into the full blaze of the later afternoon sun to see better, and abruptly everything got darker. A lot darker.

"Whoa!" I had to hang onto a tree for support, because I had both eyes shut and wasn't balancing very well. "Raven? Something's wrong."

"What?" she hurried over. "What is it?"

I explained. "My good eye—I don't know what happened to it. Everything went dark like I put on sunglasses." As I have said before, I do sometimes have panic attacks, and while I had not had one in months, not since arriving in this era, in fact—having something go catastrophically wrong with my good eye was enough to trigger one.

"You've gone white— and you're shaking. Are you okay?" she asked.

"Not if I'm losing my sight, I'm not."

"Oh, boy." She was catching my anxiety. "Okay, stay calm. Let me see," she coaxed. "It's okay. Open your eye." I did, and for a moment, everything was still dark, but with a blink, it went back to normal.

"OOoooh," she said. "That's weird. No, it's okay, it's going to be okay. Don't freak out. What I saw was like a third eyelid, like a cat's, you know? Only dark. It slid back when you blinked. Stay calm, because I'm going to move so the sun is on your face again, okay?"

The moment the sun hit me in the eye, it went darker again. I could still see, but like I said, it was darker.

"Yeah, I definitely saw it that time," she said. "Okay, I don't know what it is, but I know what we're going to do now. You're having vision problems, so it's probably not a good idea for you to be driving. You're going to give me the keys, and I'm going to drive us back to the base, where Hank is going to examine your eyes as thoroughly as he can. Don't worry, I have my license and I'm a very good driver. Charles even lets me drive his Rolls. Okay?"

"Okay," and that was what we did.

"It's not a third eye lid per se, it's a nictitating membrane," Hank said. He had checked both eyes, and both eyes now had the same peculiarity. "Your plica semiluminaris is no longer vestigial—that's the um, little pink blob in the inside inner corner of the eye, where you find mucus crusts in the morning—." he explained for Raven's benefit. "The only species of primate with a nictitating membrane that isn't vestigial is the Arctocebus calabarensis, or Calabar angwantibo. It's a monkey that lives in the rainforests of west Africa. Anyhow, it's transparent and it's definitely light-sensitive. Probably sensitive to other stimuli. I think it might even change color in response to ultraviolet radiation, because it isn't dark in artificial light."

Wow, for once I wasn't the biggest geek in the room. "Hmmm—correct me if I'm wrong," I thought out loud, "but diving mammals like sea lions and otters _do_ have functional, transparent nictitating membranes to protect their eyes while swimming and since my adaptation seems to be moving me in that direction, then this makes sense. But in that case, why am I still mutating?"

"Ah!" Hank perked up. "Yes, you're right about diving mammals, and I think I know what's happening to you. When I examined that DNA sample you gave me, I saw something—Actually, I might be able to prove my theory, but to do that, I'd need you to, uh, take your blouse off and put on a hospital gown. I have a fresh one here. I, um, need to examine your skin under ultraviolet light alone. I can also test my theory about your eyes with it, so it serves more than one purpose. I'll just leave the room while you change."

Raven stayed to help me. "You're going to be okay now, right?" she asked.

"Now that I know I'm not going blind, sure. Thanks for being there for me." I put all I felt into the last part.

"Well, you're my friend. We're hidden dragons together, right? I'm really glad you're okay. It was kind of scary, because you're always such a together person."

"I haven't had a panic attack in nearly a year," I said, "That was a phantom of the old me, come back to haunt me today. Attacks like that were why I used to take medication. It comes from feeling powerless."

"Then I'm twice as glad I was there to help," she said. "Hey, Hank? Is just her blouse okay, or does she need to take off more?"

"Oh, just the blouse," he replied.

"Then I'm ready," I said. I had an idea where this was headed, and if I was right and he was right—it was going to be pretty mind-blowing.

He came in bringing a hand-held UV lamp with him. "If you could turn around so I can illuminate your back—Thanks. I'm going to turn off the lights now."

He did so, and Raven exclaimed, "Stripes!"

"They're called Blaschko's lines, and they usually only show up under UV. It's not a mutant trait, it's a sign of something very different." Hank explained. "You see—Joon-Yi, you're a chimera."

"That explains a lot," I said. "_A lot_ a lot." Not my most coherent statement, but my mind was racing.

"The only chimera I know about is from Greek mythology, " Raven said.

"Right," Hank said, turning the lights back on, "A fire-breathing creature that was part dragon, part lion, and part goat. But a _genetic_ chimera is different. It's the opposite of identical twins. Identical twins happen when one zygote divides and splits apart into two individual organisms with identical DNA. A chimera happens when two zygotes merge, and what would have been fraternal twins had they developed normally, becomes one individual with two distinctly different, yet related, sets of DNA. The Blaschko's Lines prove it, they show where the skin's DNA differs. In some individuals the lines are even visible to the naked eye."

"Does that happen a lot?" Raven wondered.

"With animals that normally have litters, it happens all the time," I added. "The more zygotes there are, the more likely it is to happen. Nobody's sure how often it happens in humans, because the condition is usually only identified if something goes obviously wrong, like certain autoimmune disorders where the tissues reject each other, or with hermaphrodites, where the two zygotes were of opposite sexes, although it doesn't always follow that it results in hermaphroditism every time." I raised an eyebrow at Hank.

"Oh, in your case, both zygotes were female," he hastily said. "But there was something else, something that makes you truly unique."

"Let me guess. One zygote was mutant, and the other was human," I said.

"Exactly!" he said. "How did you know?"

"I think I always knew, on some level," I said. I always knew I was a mutant. "It explains a lot."

Like how my blood tests all came up human, when I knew, ever since I understood what it meant, that I was a mutant.

That was because my brain was a mutant brain, while my bone marrow was human.

It explained why Mr. Magnussen misidentified me, and why the Homeland Security thought I was the product of incest—they misread my DNA profile.

It explained my birth defects—the two zygotes did not fuse perfectly, and my forearms got left off altogether.

Perhaps it even explains why I respond so emotionally to A Tale of Two Sisters, when a psychiatrist shows a young girl a photograph of her family and asks if she can point to herself, if she knows which one she is. I am Jangwha, and I am Hongryeon, together in one. I am my sister, and she is me.

"Okay, but why am I still developing new adaptations?" I asked.

"Well—that's where it gets even more interesting. You see, between twelve to fifteen months ago, judging by your telomeres—that's how we can tell the age of cells, by studying their telomeres—," he told Raven, "you were exposed to a very powerful mutagen, repeatedly."

"I can tell you exactly what it was," I said. "Ethylmethane sulfonate. It's used in horticulture to create new varieties. I had an elderly friend who was…a hybridizer of daylilies, and in his old age, he…wasn't as careful as he should have been. That's how I was exposed—we were both exposed, actually. He got cancer from it and died. Obviously it did something to me too."

"Yes. Your mutant half went through a secondary mutation process—it's fascinating, really. I had no idea such a thing was possible. But your human half has been—well, turning mutant. Aggressively. All the cells that are fifteen months old or younger are mutant cells. Eventually, all of them will be, but with two different sets of DNA, you're going to wind up with—well, I have no idea what the end result will be. I believe that it will be confined to your soft tissues, since you're fully adult and your bone plates are finished forming. This is why you now have nictitating membranes. Oh, here."

He flashed the UV in my eyes, and yes, the membrane went up and it was darker. "So I now have built-in sunglasses. And diving goggles."

"Yes, effectively. It does look—odd, though."

"No, it doesn't," Raven contradicted him. "It makes your eyes look enormous and liquidy, like a fawn's."

"Sweet!" I said, startling Hank. "Hey, just look at this nose of mine. The bridge is almost as flat as a pancake. Glasses slide right down it and nearly off it. This is a very _practical _adaptation. I like it."

"Oh," he said, pushing his own glasses back up on his nose. "But—it is still happening, I mean, you may wind up with something you don't like."

"Well, until then, I'm going to have fun." I smiled at him. "There's a swimming pool somewhere in this complex, right? Raven, you want to go for a dip?"

I told Erik all about the latest development that night, and he was as interested as one might suppose he would be, which is to say, very. He asked questions and I answered. It was the third night he was away and our first two conversations were short and constrained by the near certainty that someone was listening to every word, but this time it flowed more easily. When it was winding down, he asked, "Am I to _Assam_ everything is well with you then?"

"That would be an entirely correct Assam-ption," I replied. "Ugh, what a _dreadful_ pun."

He chuckled. "That whole business really wasn't necessary, you know. If something were wrong, I would know from your voice."

"I…miss you," I said, and the words hung there on the line for a long moment before he replied.

"And I, you." he said, the words sounding new, never used.

"Come back soon," I said. "Come back safe."

"I shall," he said. "for I've something to come back to. Stay safe."

"I will. Good night."

"Good night." he answered, and that was that.

Except that I practically had another panic attack all by myself there, because I am horribly powerless in the face of this emotion. I need not write what it is, because it should be obvious to anyone.

* * *

><p>AN: Again I apologize if I have not replied to your reviews. Not only am I still playing Arkham City, writing this fic, and holding down a job, but Assassin's Creed: Revelations has just come out. If I do any more I shall have to give up sleeping and showering, and that just wouldn't be right. Many thanks to you, my readers. I definitely appreciate your reviews and I do plan to answer.

Anyhow, the science of chimeras is as accurate as I can make it. I've been considering this revelation for some time. The X-Men movies have often hinted that mutant is a metaphor for homosexual, such as Bobby/Iceman's mother asking him if he could just try not being a mutant, and Hank saying that 'You didn't ask, so I didn't tell', and this is my addition. It is thought that many transgender people are actually chimeras whose brains are a different gender than the parts they wound up with, and they have reassignment surgery to correct that. In that spirit, Joon-Yi, therefore, is transspecies.

Also, you don't have to worry. She won't be developing multiple personalities, because that's overdone. Her brain is all mutant, always was, no conflicts there, and if she and her sister had been born separate, they would have had a great relationship. Now that I've thoroughly confused you, I will tell you that next chapter will be at the airport and will be about Erik and Charles' return with the group. There will be _many_ surprises…


	36. Surprises

At the airport:

"Raven, your hair is red!" exclaimed Charles the moment he saw her.

"Yes," she smiled,(with a hint of storm clouds on her horizon should he disapprove), patting the ends of her hair, "I decided to go natural for a while and see how I liked it." More than just her hair color had changed, if Erik was any judge. She stood taller and straighter, and when she spoke it was with more assurance.

Charles, it seemed, was learning. "Well, if a brother's opinion counts, I, for one, like it. It suits you."

"Thank you, Charles." Raven preened a little, basking in the approval.

"It is definitely a step in the right direction," Erik added, "Nature never makes mistakes with her palette. From what Joon-Yi's told me, you and she have had hardly a dull moment all week."

"That's right, when I spoke to you on Tuesday, you said you were finding ways to keep yourselves occupied." Charles looked around. "Didn't she come along to meet us?"

"Yes, she did, but she went to powder her nose," Raven told him. "She was sure you'd show up the moment she did, and she was right. We've been so busy we hardly missed you at all, _actually_. For example, since we got our first stipend checks yesterday, I went and opened up a bank account. Um, what else—we've been using the facility pool every day, and I've taken some music lessons in town."

"Then you've been using your time very well," Charles told her. "I really should have set you up with an account of your own years ago. But music lessons, even! You know I've always thought you should try new things and even take enrichment courses. What are you studying, and how do you like it so far?"

"I've been taking singing lessons, and so far I like it a lot, but most of the lessons are just doing vocal exercises and learning how to breathe correctly. You'd think that breathing would be the easiest, most natural thing in the world, but you wouldn't believe how complicated it is."

"I'm delighted to hear that," he said, kissing the top of her head. "Since you've only just started, I imagine it will be a while before you're ready for a recital or a concert, but when you are, I'll be there in the front row."

"I'm going to hold you to that, you know," she told him severely. "After being there for all your graduations, that's the least you can do for me!"

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," he said.

"Anyway, where are these recruits? Last I heard you had a, ahem, go-go dancer, a cab driver, a convict and one regular kid." Raven looked around.

"They're collecting their luggage, which is what I ought to be doing—Oh, Joon-Yi. There you are, and you look smashing, I must say. Like you just stepped down out of a travel poster for Shanghai."

Erik turned. Charles was right; she was the very picture of a classic Asian beauty. Even the humans swarming the airport were noticing and doing double takes at the sight of her. She was dressed in crimson and black again, the same colors she had worn to see them off, but where that outfit had been sporty and causal, this one was elegant and sophisticated. She wore a fitted jacket and knee length skirt in red silk satin, embroidered here and there with small black butterflies, pearls at her throat and even a little open-mesh veil attached to her hair with a flowered comb and angled over her eyes, neither of which was covered with a patch.

"My, what big eyes you have," he remarked. "And no longer bruised and swollen either, I am happy to see." He had not realized how grim his mood was until he saw her and felt the weight of it ease. Just the sight of her made him want to smile.

"All the better to see you with," she replied cheerfully. "Speaking of which, you look very sharp. I haven't seen you in a suit and tie before."

"Thank you," he touched the knot of his tie.

"Come on, Charles. Let's go get your luggage and find your recruits," Raven tugged at her brother's arm. "You two should stay here so we can find you again." The glance she shot at them while she walked away was mischievous and conspiratorial.

"You've told her about us," Erik remarked as they strolled over to a seating area by the windows.

"I was required to by the ancient and sacred Girl Code of female friendship," she said, taking a seat. "Think of it as the Geneva Convention written in lipstick and signed with eyeliner. However, I didn't share anything you would object to her knowing. Unbend a little and sit down with me? Unless you have to go collect your own bags, of course."

She gestured to the spot on the sofa next to her. "It would be my pleasure," he said. "I have no luggage other than a carry one; I've learned to travel light…You really are the epitome of Asian beauty today, by the way."

"Thank you," she smiled. "I don't often go out of my way to dress Asian, but it fit so well and the color and symbolism was too perfect. Red is for joy and butterflies stand for love and the soul. I don't know of a culture on earth that doesn't equate butterflies with the soul. It seems to be a universal concept."

"It looks as though it were made for you," he said, reaching into his carry-on. "And speaking of things that were made for you, I did not forget."

She sat up straighter, looking at the bag he put on the sofa between them. "My tea," she exclaimed with pleasure, taking the package. "This is rather weighty for just a few tins of tea, though."

"An impulse purchase," he waved dismissively. "Nothing much, although it is somewhat heavy."

"Ohhh—," she went through the bag, "All my favorites, and a few more—Earl Grey, I should have put that on the list—and strawberry tea. Here's the heavy culprit." She found the box at the bottom and opened it while he watched her face light up.

"It's beautiful," she said. The tea shop had a selection of cast iron teapots, both functional and decorative at once. He'd chosen one which made him think of her, with a design of windblown grasses and a praying mantis as the knob on the lid. "Thank you, Erik. It's exactly what I need and would have chosen. I've been making do with mugs. Thank you."

"I'm glad you like it," he said.

"I do! I—Erik, I have something I have to say, something I've been thinking about, this past week. This isn't going to be easy for me to say and I only hope you'll hear me out in one go, because I don't know if I could get going again.

"I know…you're committed to stopping Schmidt because you don't want to starve slowly due to environmental destruction any more than anyone else—and that's all." She looked down at the pot; he could almost see her invisible 'hand' trace the design.

"It's a start," she said cryptically. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, "I have no idea what kind of mother I might make. The whole 'nature vs. nurture' question is rather problematic for me. If nurture trumps nature, then I think I'll do all right. I could hardly have had a better example than the parents who chose me and went half way around the globe to bring me home. But if nature wins out—I don't know a thing about my genetic mother and father.

"Perhaps leaving me in the care of others was in its way an act of love. My parents, the _real_ ones, the ones who adopted me, did so without any guarantees that I would grow up into a self-sufficient adult. I could have been brain-damaged or mentally retarded or—even a mutant. They were prepared to love me anyway. They _did_ love me anyway, and you know what? If I could tell them, right now, 'Mom, Dad, I'm a mutant'. I think their reaction would be something like, 'Hon, we love you and this is _not_ that huge a surprise.'"

Joon-Yi paused. "The point of all this is, I love you. I have been very angry about that. Utterly furious in fact. Yesterday I went out and chucked rocks at other rocks for the better part of an hour because I wanted to hit something, I was so angry. All the options I had, all the thousands of things I could do, have dwindled down to just two, and that's either being with you or not being with you. So.

"All those things I said the other day? I was only half joking. I want to clarify matters. I won't promise to obey you, but I promise to respect you. I won't always agree with you, but I will always hear you out, and if I object strongly I'll do it in private. I will _never _tear into you in front of people like I did Schmidt, no matter how bad I think an idea or plan might be. I won't follow blindly, but I'll be right there to navigate, and maybe we'll wind up at a different destination than the one you would have if you were alone.

"Ideally I'd like to wait a couple of years before starting a family. I'm already on the Pill because of my periods, anyhow. Oh, and I realize that living on a waterfront might not be realistic. It would just be nice, that's all. That's..." she paused. "That's all I've got. I can't _be_ other than I am, not for you or anyone. If you can accept that and accept me...then I will marry you."

There was only one answer to make to that statement, slightly confused and rambling as it was, and he leaned over. Kissing her _was_ easier sitting down, but in public like this, one couldn't put all into it that one would like. "Do you want a white dress and all the trappings?" he asked when they paused for air.

"Emma Frostbite has put me off the all-white look forever and I think all the trappings are for people with more family and friends than either of us has. A few words in front of a Justice of the Peace are fine with me, with Raven and Charles there as our witnesses." Joon-Yi smiled, and her impish side came to the fore. "Luckily bright red is perfectly traditional for brides of Asian heritage."

"Yah, it is." a voice came from above and behind them. "So where's your fuckin' war?" It was the man from the bar. He smelled no better than he had then, but he had a beaten-up canvas bag over one shoulder and a truculent expression on his face.

Erik replied, "Everywhere," as Joon-Yi said, "Cuba."

"Ya wanna minute to make up your minds?" he asked, chewing a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

* * *

><p>AN: Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, and hello to everybody else out there! Yes, that is Logan interrupting, and the consequences will be interesting. I put links to Joon-Yi's outfit on my profile page. There is a storefront on Etsy called Timeless Vixen Vintage (and I swear the seller must have a time machine in her back room, because her stuff is museum quality) which I sometimes consult for wardrobe details. That's where I saw the suit, although those are not Joon-Yi's measurements and she isn't wearing the matching coat because she thinks the cut is dowdy.


	37. Logan

Over the past week, I had lived seven years worth of emotion and turmoil as I came to grips with this: that I could not speak so eloquently and so truthfully for those who had loved Erik most unless I loved him too. Of _course_ I did. Love is love. Everything had been there with Mr. Magnussen-compatible intellects, similar senses of humor, shared interests, all the less definable things, yet we were too out of synch with each other in age for anything but friendship.

My subconsciousness had done its best to tell me too. I had been having far-too-vivid dreams that I was Anya or Mother Lensherr, or else that they were calling me to task for what had become of him. I may love A Tale of Two Sisters, but that doesn't mean I want a version of it going on in my head every night.

It was not a good moment for anyone to interrupt, let alone this stranger, whose head I would gladly have bitten off. Erik had described him well enough over the phone (His exact words were 'Hairy, surly, foul-mouthed and rank-smelling',) that I could recognize him as the one who refused. "In the larger scheme of things, he is correct, but all the signs point to trouble in Cuba in about two months' time," I explained.

Erik was blunter and more to the point. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "Given that the last time I saw you, you were too busy sopping up rotgut to give a civil answer, I find your appearance here suspect."

"I heard ya say to the other guy at the door that I looked like I could fight. I can. When I ran outta cash, I followed ya. Here I am. Fifty a day, plus expenses." Hairy said, shifting the cigar around in his mouth again.

"If you were out of money, how did you get a seat on the plane?" Erik asked.

"I got ways," he replied. Taking his cigar out of his mouth, he tapped the ash off on the back of the sofa. "She one of the ones who can't fight?" he indicated me. "Cause she sure don't look like she can."

"Miss Song is intelligence, not field." Erik replied.

"Yah? What about you?" He must have had that knife spring-loaded up his sleeve or something, but no sooner was it out than it was stuck hilt deep in the ceiling and he was on his back looking up at it.

"What the hell ass?" he complained.

"The knife was my doing," Erik explained. "She knocked you down and is keeping you there."

"And ya say she's intelligence and not field?," asked the mutant on the floor.

"That's how intelligent I am," I replied. "If I let you up, are you going to pull any more knives or guns or do anything else stupid?"

"Nah," he said, and as he picked himself up, he told Erik, "Hell of a girl you got there, Lensherr."

"I know," Erik said, just a little smugly.

Right then, Charles practically sprinted up, Raven close on his heels, "Is everything all right?" he asked anxiously. "I caught a glimpse of—You?" he had caught sight of our stranger, but our stranger had caught sight of Raven.

"_Hel_-lo, Red," he said, and wolf-whistled, looking her up and down.

"It's Raven, not Red," she said, casting him a dirty look and moving around behind us.

"What is he doing here?" Charles pointed at him.

"Apparently he followed us home," Erik informed him. "Now we have to decide whether to keep him." I opted not to make a snarky comment about having him neutered first because under all the stink and hair, he was quite a hunky specimen. Provided he showered for a week, he might be quite attractive.

"What for?" Charles asked.

I couldn't resist. "Are you asking why he followed you or why we ought to keep him?"

"Ya could try asking me," said the man in question. "What the hell kinda outfit is this, anyhow?"

"We're working with the CIA to capture-," Charles began, but Erik interrupted.

"Kill." was what he put in.

"-to _stop_ a group of people with paranormal powers, mutant powers. Since they've got powers, we're looking for people with mutant powers as well. Such as yourself. First, what is your name, and what have you to offer?" Charles asked defiantly.

"The name's Logan. Just Logan. Nothin' else. Can I have that back?" the stranger pointed at the knife. "So's I can demonstrate."

"Very well. No false moves," Erik cautioned him. The knife flew back to the man's hand, and he immediately used it to slash his left palm.

"Hey, you could wind up with blood poisoning that way," I protested, but as I said the words, the wound clotted and closed up. "Or not."

He wiped the knife on a rag and made it disappear somewhere on his person. "That's it. I got the sharpest senses ya'll ever find, I don't get sick, I don't die, I get fifty a day plus expenses, and I don't switch sides even if the other guy offers more, not until the contract is done. Now while you fight over whether a roughneck like me is worth the hassle, I'm off to the head." He picked up his scruffy duffle bag and started off in the direction of the men's room, sparing another once-over for Raven as he passed her. "Always had a thing for the redheads." he commented.

"Yeah, well, you can keep it away from _this_ particular redhead," she snapped back, which only made him grin.

"Raven, go back to blonde immediately," Charles seethed.

"What? Here, in public?" The seating area we were using was not that public, actually.

"Everybody else seems to be breaking cover, so why not you too?" he said. I could not look at Erik, not even out of the corner of my eye, because if I did I would laugh and so would he.

"No." Raven defied him.

"What do you mean, no? Do you want to encourage that- that ruffian?"

"I can handle him whatever color my hair is. Lots of guys hit on me, although they aren't all as wolfish about it as he is."

"Wolfish? More like a wolverine, all stench and aggression. He lives his life in nothing but the moment, lurching from one brawl to the next, one bar to the next, one war to the next. Believe me, I've seen his mind, and there is no depth to it." Charles was fuming.

"On the other hand, our hosts have been complaining about our recruits being nothing but untrained civilians and a motley assortment at that. This one might mollify them," Erik pointed out.

"Since when are you concerned with mollifying the CIA?" Charles asked.

"I'm not, but you are."

"Speaking of your recruits," I did my best to divert the course of this conversation, "where are they?"

"Oh, there was a van for them. We'll be riding back with Moira." Charles replied.

"But Joon-Yi brought her car," Raven said.

"That might work out for the best," Erik raised an eyebrow in my direction. "Are you ready to make that side trip into Maryland?" he asked me.

"I am if you are," I told him.

"Very well, then. Joon-Yi and I are getting married," he announced.

Raven let out a squeal of joy and hugged me, while Charles wasted a second in gaping before he recovered. "Well, let me be the first to offer you congratulations and best wishes, then. I'll tell you what," he smiled as a thought struck him, "You should have it on the grounds at my place. They're at their best in spring."

"I thank you for the offer," Erik said, "but when I say we're getting married, I mean we're getting married today. With the two of you to witness, I hope."

"Of course!" Raven burst out. "Except I'm going to buy another roll of film. I brought my camera, but I'm down to the last three shots, and I want a picture of this. You know this is probably historic, right? The first mutant wedding!" She dashed off in the direction of the airport shops.

"I hadn't thought of that, but I suppose she's right. The first on record where both parties are acknowledged mutants, anyway." I said.

"The next consideration is, where is the nearest Justice of the Peace?" Erik asked me. "Do you know?"

"No, I don't."

"Then I'm off to find a phone booth, because the consideration after that is, where are we spending the night? You're a good friend, Charles, but I'd rather not have a telepath down the hall tonight. In fact, since it's Friday, we may as well make it a weekend."

That left Charles and I alone together. "Just like that?" he asked me, looking worried. "I mean, it is your decision, but knowing what you know-as a friend, I ask, is it wise?"

"Wise?" I echoed him. "Ask me that again in ten years, or twenty. I don't know. But-where do you really need light the most? Is it outdoors in the blaze of noon?"

"No," he responded, puzzled. "you need light in dark places. Ah. I think I take your meaning."

"And when you bring light into dark places, then they aren't dark any more. They're just shadowy. Besides, any Dark Side I join is going to have absolutely awesome cookies when I'm the one baking them."

"I won't pretend I understand that last part, but you shouldn't have to sacrifice yourself like this."

"I'm not. I love him."

"Then I wish you every happiness in the world-but I shall still worry. Now, about Raven. Are she and Hank- -?"

"No. After such a sparky beginning, that seems to be fizzling out very quickly into simple friendship. He—can't adjust. 'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.'" I quoted.

"Um—Shakespeare, obviously. 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds/Oh, no, it is an ever fixed mark—.' That's all I've got of it." He smiled.

"Sonnet 116," I nodded. "One of his best. I think you left out a line, but knowing what I know, if there's anyone who needs to get on the 'Beautiful in my way' wagon train, it's Hank, and he _does_ deserve to die a virgin. Mind you, I do like him, but in years to come I'll bet he's going to look back and remember Raven as the one who got away."

"So she's single, huh?" Logan said from behind us.

"I didn't hear you come up!" I gave him a dirty look. "That's twice you've snuck up on me." He had done more than just relieve himself while he was in the men's room—he had taken the trouble to change his shirt and his hair was wet. That plus a marked improvement in the way he smelled suggested that he did indeed know what soap was for and how to use it. This was not for my benefit, nor for Charles or Erik either.

"I'm good at stealthy," he said.

"I didn't hear him either, and I'm the telepath." Charles gave him an even dirtier look.

"I'm _real_ good at stealthy." Logan reiterated.

"Be that as it may, Raven is also my sister, and—."

"No, she ain't." Logan tapped his nose. "Not even half. I can smell when folks are kin, and ya don't smell anything like her."

"He means by adoption. Adoption counts," I said.

"Won't argue that with ya. So, am I in?"

"That depends. Why don't you tell us why you're really here and so eager to join," Charles's tones were suddenly fifty degrees colder.

TBC….


	38. The Wedding

This Xavier guy was bluffing, Logan figured. He knew tough, and unlike Lensherr, who was stone cold, Xavier wasn't it.

Yet he seemed to be the one who need convincing, so Logan replied, "Instinct," because it was true, though hard to explain. Something about them stood out like a burlesque dancer at a Mennonite meeting, and what was more, it was like he knew them from somewhere, which wasn't out of the question.

But now Xavier was looking at him funny, touching his fingers to his temple—and it was like those same fingers were rifling through his head, cold and invasive.

For his part, Xavier was discovering that Logan had more to him than met the eye, even if that eye was mental. To begin with, Logan was older than he looked, much older. He was over a hundred, and to him the years passed by like days, while the individual days lasted forever, or so it seemed. Everyone's head was a different place, and Logan's had so many memories it was like….like the massive Xavier mansion, room after room , each room a different era, a scene reenacted. Some of those rooms were completely empty, lost to brain damage which his healing power reversed but did not restore.

It began in a fine house in Canada, where young James Howlett Jr. lived with his distant mother and his loving father. A fragile, sickly child prone to violent allergic reactions, he had few friends, except for the son of one of the servants, a boy named Victor, Victor Creed… The boy's father, Logan Creed, was crude, prone to drunkenness and would have been turned out years before except that Mrs. Howlett took pity on his son's motherless state, or so she always said. Then one horrible night when the adult Creed came to the door with a gun and the world came to an end. His father was dead and his father was not his father and he had no right to the name of James Howlett, instead he was the get of Logan Creed and his friend was his brother and he was…something strange, something for which no word yet existed but _monster_.

What came then? A hundred years of war. The uniforms changed, the guns got better, the languages were different. Now and then was a brief period of peace, when he worked in wood and lived with a woman (yes, usually a redhead), killing only animals and only to put meat on the table, but inevitably something happened—his lover died or his brother came back or someone noticed that Logan fellow didn't age a day…. He _did_ lurch from conflict to conflict around the globe, but beside him, behind him like his shadow, was his brother, his half-brother Victor, monstrous, human only in shape, the only point of continuity in his long life. But unlike Victor, there was in Logan a core of something good and honorable, even noble. Where the bonds of brotherly loyalty frayed and snapped, where the loathing became too great was a day in Korea, beginning with an attempted rape and a commanding officer who got in the way and ending with a firing squad. Logan had woken up alone afterward, in a body bag among the dead, another chunk of memory gone. His brother was missing—dead? No. Simply gone, and his scent trail gone cold.

With such a past, was there any other way to live _but_ moment to moment, when there was no home to go to and no one waiting for him if he could get there?

Charles withdrew from Logan's mind. "I'm sorry, Mr. Logan. I—misjudged you. I would be honored if you were to join us."

Logan was not so easily pacified. "What the fuck did ya just do to my head?"

"I—," He had to step back a pace, because the larger man's stance went to menacing. "I—simply had a look in, and what I saw does you great credit. Please, forgive me for the intrusion." Charles regained that lost degree of composure. "I will never do so again."

"You sure as hell won't, because—."

Lensherr's girl intervened. "Please, Mr. Logan. Forgive him. He can be a jerk at times, but he's still learning how to relate to others of our kind. We're all still learning, in truth. Many mutants have never met another mutant before and we're all making this up as we go along. Give us a chance." She had sweet soft dark eyes, almost enough to distract a man from noticing she had hooks instead of hands, and she smelled good even under the perfume she had on, but not as good as Raven did. Redheads had a scent that was all their own. "Besides, if you try and hurt him, I'll have to stop you. "

"Uh—yeah," She'd been behind the invisible force that swept his legs out from under him and pinned him down. "Just stay out of my head from now on." he told the telepath.

"I will, I promise—," Xavier said, sincerely, "As long as you stay away from my sister."

"Fair enough," Logan replied. Nothing was said about him having to keep Raven away from _him_. Lady's choice, after all.

Then Lensherr came back, and it seemed that what was happening was that he and his girl, Eun-Yee or Joon-Yi, whichever it was, were getting married and not because they had to, either, because she didn't smell like she was knocked up. Well, if that was what they wanted, good for them, but they were going to do it that day, so when Raven came back with a dark auburn haired skirt who was introduced as Moira, they all went out and drove off to a justice of the peace. Raven rode with the bride and groom, and he with Moira and Xavier. "Where is it we're going? Suitland? This is Washington, the whole damn place is Suit Land."

But the drive itself wasn't that long, and then they were pulling up behind the other car on a side street in front of a bungalow with a small plaque out front saying that this was a justice of the peace. It looked like an office run out of somebody's house, and when they got inside, that impression was proven true. The Justice and his wife were a pleasant older couple who greeted them all, taking the fact that bride and groom were of different races in stride, and everything was all right.

That is, until the Justice got out his glasses to read over the license after they had filled it out. "Bride's name—Junie Song, marital status, single."

"Joon-Yi," she pointed out.

"Joo-knee?" he tried again.

"Close enough," she gave in.

"Groom's name, Erik Magnus Lensherr, marital status, widower. Uh—do you have any proof of that?"

"Widower?" While no surprise to the bride, it was a facer for the others. "Did you know?" Raven whispered to her brother.

"No, I'd no idea." he replied.

"No," Lensherr told him, making an effort not to be visibly pissed. Logan had him down for one of those guys whose face was gonna crack and fall off one of these days. "It was a decade ago in another country. I have no written proof at all. If it's apt to prove a difficulty, then let us have another license and I'll put down 'single'."

"No, no, it's all right. Bride's occupation—pharmacist. Groom's—metallurgist. Bride's country of birth, Korea. Country of citizenship, United States. Groom's country of birth, Germany, citizen of Israel. I _will_ need to see your papers."

"Right here," Joon-Yi produced several folded sheets of paper from her purse, while Lensherr brought out his passport.

"This isn't one of those citizenship arrangements, is it?" the Justice asked, inspecting the documents. Somewhere in the background, his wife was stirring a pitcher of lemonade.

"Definitely not," Lensherr put an arm around his girl's shoulders and they smiled at each other—no, beamed was the word for it. It was the pleasantest expression Logan had seen yet on the man.

"All right. Bride's religion, Unitarian. Groom's, Judaism. Bride's race—mutant. Groom's—mutant? What the Sam Hill?" He looked up at them.

"That one stays," Joon-Yi told him, very clearly. "It doesn't affect the legality of the union. That part is only demographic information, after all."

"Yes, but—why?"

"It's important to us," the groom said.

"All right then. You've paid the fee, so—I'm, uh, guessing this is going to be without rings—." he glanced at the bride's artificial arms.

"That would be correct," Lensherr confirmed.

"Then we'll begin. Friends, we are gathered here today to join in marriage this woman and this man. Are you both here of your own free will and free to enter into this contract?"

"I am." "Yes."

"Are there any here who know of any reason why they should not be so joined?"

Silence.

After that it all went smoothly, except for a bump when the bride promised 'to love, honor and respect' rather than repeating 'obey', and giving the Justice a piercing glare when he looked like he was going to say something, and then when the man swung into the part about having them join hands, which didn't bother them. All in all, although Logan hadn't been to many hitchings, this one was one of the better ones. After they kissed there was a lot of hugging among the women and handshaking among the men and the Justice's wife served them lemonade while the Justice took a few photos of them all with Raven's camera.

By then it was on the other side of five o'clock, and getting something to eat seemed like a good idea. All six of them wound up in a spaghetti joint, and even though the newlyweds really just wanted to go off and fuck, they pretended like they didn't and carried their share of the conversation. It was kinda nice, sitting and chewing the fat like that with a bunch of people who weren't likely to get killed in the next twelve hours, and he even managed to get in a few good lines here and there, making Raven laugh a few times.

After dinner, Lensherr and his new wife took off to wherever they were going, and he got back in the car, with the improvement of Raven across from him in the back seat. This was while Xavier was still settling up the bill and Moira was in the head. He was about to make some comment when she held up a finger. "Before you keep on trying to flirt with me, I want you to see something," she said, turning on the little light over their heads. "Take a real good look."

She turned blue. "Whoa," he said, nearly swallowing his cigar. "What the—You got eyes like a snowy owl." he said, because she did, clear bright yellow. She was still gorgeous, but this was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen.

"Yes, I guess I do." she said, smiling like she'd just put one over on him.

"Wild," he said, "I mean, you look like something wild. Wait a minute—you're _all_ blue. Does that mean—are you sitting there naked?"

"Um—in a way." She changed back, looking embarrassed. "Not like, _naked_ naked. Just seminaked. Like birds and animals aren't naked because they have feathers and fur, covering…things."

"Covering things. Like, your, um, scales cover up your…whatever. And that's all. You're still sitting there naked now." His body was warming up to the fact that he was in the back seat of a car with a naked girl who had a fine rack on her and nothing else. And she had a brother who could read minds. He was…screwed was not the right word. The opposite of screwed. And his dick seemed to be colorblind.

"Um—could you maybe forget this ever happened?" she asked, all timid now. "Please?"

"Not fucking ever," he replied. At least he was sitting down…

It was a hard ride to the CIA compound—.

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><p>AN: So I took a few liberties with Logan's background too. Hope all is clear now.


	39. More Surprises, Redone

A/N: This is the second version of this chapter-the first version was much shorter and nobody but bub32453 seemed to like it, (Thank you, Bub!) so I tuned it up a little, added another thousand words and am posting it again.

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><p>So, yes. Reader, I married Erik. Unlike a Victorian novel, though, this does not signal the wrap-up chapter where I tell you all about the happily-ever-after. In fact, we barely got out of the parking lot before events overtook us.<p>

"So where are we going?" I asked as he backed the car out of the space.

"The Mayflower Hotel, in Washington," he told me.

"Nice! I went there with my mom and sisters one time for afternoon tea. They had a harpist on a balcony above the room. It was at the holidays, and everything was very beautiful…I miss them."

"Perhaps someday you'll take your own daughters there," he glanced over at me.

"That's a nice thought," I said, taking the veil comb and pins from my hair. "Traditions have to start somewhere. So do families."

"Letting your hair down?" he asked.

"Literally and metaphorically," I shook my head. He glanced at me again, looked in the rearview mirror and frowned. "Is something wrong?" I turned to see a car coming up behind us at speed.

"I don't know…" he said. The car blinked its high beams at us.

"I think that's Moira's car." It was, and we pulled over. They stopped behind us.

"I'm sorry and this is lousy timing, but they have definite news of Shaw," Moira told up. "Mr. Black just radioed."

Erik and I exchanged glances. "What, do you think I'm going to pout or whine? Of course this takes priority," I said aloud. "Let's get back to the base."

"You are always surprising me," he said while turning the car around.

"Am I?" I asked.

"Constantly. To begin with, I thought you would flee in terror after I told you about my wif-my _first_ wife."

"I hope I would never do anything that clichéd," I replied.

"I don't think you could. Another way in which you are surprising is that you believe, deep down in your heart of hearts, that being a mutant is wonderful and that you are quite normal. It's not merely something you say, such as 'Mutant and Proud'. You don't have to work at it. You don't question it. You're simply convinced of it."

"Well, it _is_ wonderful and I _am_ normal. _Differently_ normal, I grant you. Don't you believe that, too?" The last person I would have thought I would ever have this conversation with was Erik.

"Up until ten days ago, I believed I was alone in my difference, but for Schmidt, who I was hunting even to the ends of the earth, like the Monster after Frankenstein. I see my powers as a weapon. Charles sees his as a burden he must bear; the children we've been recruiting, Hank and Raven included, see their mutations as a curse, a stigma, something to hide. You alone rejoice in it, and that's not something you picked up from Schmidt."

"If I picked up Schmidt's attitude, I'd be striding around snarling, 'Kneel, you miserable minions!' at humans, and that's not just clichéd, it's rude." It was also what Magneto barked at the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the start of the 'Uranium Summit' incident in 1987, live on national television.

In 1962, though, it just made him laugh. "Anything but rudeness!—You might have been able to get away with that line in a silent film back in 1910, but not since then."

"And the villain would have to twirl his moustache, too," I agreed. "I wish I could explain where I get it from. All I can do is repeat what I said the other night. I always knew I was a mutant, and all those years when it seemed like I wasn't, I was first angry and then confused and lost. Everything's finally right with the world."

I could not tell him that part of my conviction was born the night after my suicide attempt, when I lay on a mattress in the hallway of the Psychiatric Ward, the same night of the Statue of Liberty incident, the first time I became aware of who and what Magneto was. Yes, at the lowest moment of my life, he was there. Only on television, but he was there.

Before that, 'Magneto' was only a name to me, like Saddam Hussein or Darth Vader. At that moment—yes, he was a terrorist, and yes, he did evil things, but he was also a mutant. He was a mutant and he was strong and powerful and afraid of no one, defiant despite what had happened to him, and right then I could have used a big dose of what he had.

Thus began my interest in him. You remember that paper I did on him for ethics class, back in college?

I got a D minus on it, thanks to the 'inappropriate subject and content', but I appealed it to the Academic Board on the grounds that my writing, reasoning and research met every possible standard and the paper should be graded on that alone. The board agreed with me. I wound up with an A minus.

"Hang on to that conviction," Erik said, "You may yet convince us all."

I had never thought of him as being unsure like that.

The other noteworthy conversation of the drive on the way back to the base was between Raven and me, and it took place in a highway rest stop. We were in the ladies' room, doing what one does in a ladies' room when she opened it from the next stall by saying, "Joon-Yi? I have to ask you for something, and you have to promise not to laugh."

"Do you need toilet paper or a tampon?" I queried.

"Um, neither. It's about Logan. You know how he was acting toward me at dinner—well, I thought I ought to nip it in the bud, so when we were alone for a moment in the car, I—I showed him." It all came out in a rush.

"How badly did he freak?" I asked. "I'll go kick his butt for you."

"That's just it. He didn't freak. He was startled, but then he said I had eyes like a snowy owl and I looked like something wild."

"Oh!" I flushed the toilet and unlocked the stall door. "Well, he _is_ quite attractive in a rough-hewn, outdoorsy way. Animal magnetism, you know? If he could shower regularly, and if you like him, then—I'm not going to say you should just go bang him, I'd never say that any more than I would recommend you start using heroin, but—."

"That isn't all. Um, he guessed how my clothes are usually just my skin, and that I was—am—actually naked." Her voice got small and a little squeaky with embarrassment. "Since then, he's been sitting there and I think…he hasn't stopped thinking about me being naked."

"Oh. Again, do I have to go kick his butt?"

"Nooooo," she drew out the word. "But if you could lend me a jacket or a sweater or something, somewhere that he can see, so he knows I'm not naked anymore. That's what I wanted to ask."

"Yes, I've got a cardigan in my overnight bag in the trunk," I was really having trouble keeping control over my face, but I _wasn't_ laughing. Must. Not. Laugh.

"I can see part of your face in the mirror through the gap between the door and the frame, you know," she said, half-scolding, half teasing. "I can _see_ you not laughing. Oh. Um. I need some more paper after all. Don't laugh!"

I didn't, either…until Erik and I were back in the car alone. He also thought that Raven's predicament was funny. "Poor Hank, though," I said. "You know, I've tried to tell him that using the word 'behoove' unironically in casual conversation is not so much a sign that someone is intellectual as it a sign that they have on overstarched underwear, and he didn't get it."

"He is not on her level," Erik said. "People tend to pair up with those who are equally attractive. You need look no further than us for an example."

"True, but smart is sexy too." Far from it for me to disagree with that statement.

"Not when it isn't bright enough to recognize 'There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in its proportions.'"

"Umm—Francis Bacon?" I asked.

"Got in one."

"But it does underscore one problem mutants face," I looked out the window at the Virginia landscape, lit by a moon that had a tinge of orange to it already. Autumn was coming, and with it, the Crisis.

"Which is?" Erik glanced at me, and then back at the road.

"In some ways, our diversity works against us. All cultures have their own unique standards of beauty, some of which go to extremes others find repulsive. The only constant is that youth and health usually go hand in hand with fertility, so youth and health are especially attractive. We're not going to get very far as a species if we can't bear to pair up and mate with each other."

"I think we'd both rather be proving that won't be a problem right now," he remarked. "Not on the personal level, at least."

I reached out with my unseen fingers to touch his lips, trace down his chin, then to his throat, further down, to chest, solar plexus, navel—. "Oh, I know it won't be."

He shivered; I could feel his pulse quicken. "The last thing I want to do is dissuade you, but at a time when I'm not driving, I think. No, as a species, we're going to be reliant on humans to swell our numbers for several generations to come… That's a troublesome thought."

"Then let's not contemplate it now. We're not that far away now, are we?" I found a clip in my purse and coiled my hair up again.

"What's that jingling noise?" he asked.

"It's these," I felt around and pulled out a pair of little metal bells, silvery in color and in tone. "They're ghost bells. In Korea and other parts of Asia, ghosts used to be, and maybe in some places still are, like tenants with rent control, a fact of life that goes along with a piece of property. If you're the current owner, sometimes you have to negotiate with them or as a last ditch, try and evict them for bad behavior. For that you call in a shamaness who has a staff with bells like these on it to act as intermediary." I jingled them.

"Why do _you_ have them?"

"I saw them in an antique store in Vegas and thought they'd look nice on a pair of hair sticks. Then I realized the sound would drive me mad."

"Perhaps they had the same effect on the ghosts." he quipped.

By this time we had pulled up in front of the CIA base, right behind Moira and the others. We were told by a humorless suit that Mr. Black was awaiting us in the conference room. And by us, he meant Moira, Charles, Erik and myself. Raven went off to the rec room to meet the other recruits, and at the time, I thought Logan had followed her. But as he had told us, he was real good at stealthy.

"What took you all so long?" snapped the bespectacled man at the head of the table.

"A wedding," Erik replied, seeing me to a seat and taking the one next to mine while Moira and Charles took places on the other side of the table. "Ours, to be precise." He nodded in my direction.

"Wonderful. So now you're breeding them!" he spat at Black.

"Any breeding we may do will be for our own benefit and has nothing to do with him, you, or any governmental agency here or elsewhere." Erik gave him a glare that should have inflicted hypothermia. "The boor is, I think, CIA director McCone, the lump to his left is called Stryker, and I didn't bother learning the names of the rest," he told me. "They're not that interesting."

McCone ignored him. "Before any more sensitive information is handed out, I want to know her story." He stabbed a finger in my direction. "I stopped believing in Santa Claus a long time ago. Nobody just gives you stuff out of the goodness of their heart. All that information on Shaw—. What kind of game is she playing?"

"Chess is my game of preference," I said, stalling, "but Gin Rummy is not out of the question."

Black broke in. "Miss Son—Mrs. Lensherr, I should say—it would go a long way toward smoothing matters over if you could be more forthcoming about your past."

He looked as though he had been through a lot already, and I had come to respect him, but…what was I supposed to say? I shifted, and the ghost bells jingled softly in my purse.

Maybe the ghost of some long dead shamaness spoke to me, or maybe my imagination went into overdrive under pressure, but a truly inspired lie unfolded in my mind at that moment, a grand whopper both radiant and splendid, cribbed together from horror movies and those godawful stereotype-laden Chinatown episodes every cop or mystery show does at least once in their run.

I expanded my field so I could talk to Charles. **Tell Erik he and I met in Jerusalem around Easter of last year**.

_What?_

**It was on the street and we each realized the other was a mutant and have been working together ever since!**

_You're going to lie to them?_

**Yes! It's not like I can tell them the truth! He and I went to a café and talked all night. Just please tell him now!**

_All right. I might have to help you put this over_**.**

**Is that a challenge?**

All that took place at the speed of thought. I saw Erik's expression change ever so slightly when Charles told him, surprise and amusement followed by neutrality, waiting for whatever I would say.

"Shall I tell them now?" I asked him, timidly.

"Yes, dear," he replied. "It does not matter now."

I took a deep breath and reached into my purse for the ghost bells. "I said I was Korean. That is not entirely true. I am half Korean, on my mother's side. My father was Japanese. That may seem of little importance to you—but considering where and when and how I was born, it meant a great deal.

"These were my mother's. They are all I have left to remember her. You see, I come from a long line of _mudang_, shamanesses, who act as intermediaries between the living and the dead…"

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><p>AN: So have you all heard about Michael Fassbender's new movie Shame? I'd like to go see it, basically because it has him in it. All of him. Everything. No clothes, just him. Full everything, NC-17 rated. On the other hand, while he apparently gives a very good performance, no puns intended, it also sounds depressing and possibly squick-icky.


	40. The Lie

Joon-Yi's eyes focused on the bells dangling from her hooks, a faraway look on her face. "There are two sorts of mudang, the hereditary and the initiated. My family were hereditary mudang. It's a matrilineal gift. The rituals involve chanting and dancing until one enters a trance state where the spirits of the dead can speak through you... It is not, you must understand, a profession of high social standing. More often we were paid in food or old clothes rather than money. My mother's name was Joon-seh. Even in a family such as ours, she was exceptional."

Erik watched and listened with an expression that said he was familiar with the whole story. Anyone who knew her as he did would have known she was lying—except this was not so much a lie as it was performance art. When she told the truth, her words often fought to get around whatever it was she could not yet speak of, coming out haltingly.

Lowering the bells, which chimed softly, she looked at her audience. "She could predict natural events, like storms or earthquakes. Predicting what people would do was not possible, as there were too many variables. She could read what was inside sealed envelopes, and I don't mean by using one-ahead tricks or wetting a white envelope with rubbing alcohol to make it translucent. My mother's power was real. She could even imprint images on photographic plates or on rolls of film with the power of her mind. However, she was also barely literate and unworldly.

"My father was Doctor Koichi Yamamura, thoroughly Japanese, a cultural anthropologist who sought to preserve mudang traditions and lore before they were eradicated completely. Japan was doing its best to rewrite and eradicate quite a lot of Korean history and culture at the time. They'd invaded and annexed Korea in 1910, occupying our country until 1945, right after their defeat in World War Two. They seized our land and resources, exploited and abused us, conscripted men as forced labor, and women...became forced laborers of another sort. Comfort women for the military.

"I mention that so you have some context. He was looking for folktales and cultural lore. What he found was someone with genuine paranormal abilities. When they met, she was seventeen, of a lower class, a citizen of a subjugated nation. He was in his forties. He had a wife and family in Japan, advanced degrees, a university position. It was not a relationship of equals. I don't remember my father very well. I doubt I could pick him out of a photograph if you set one in front of me. I'd remember his voice, though.

"We, that is, my mother and I, lived with my grandmother, and when he visited, I was either already asleep or got hustled off into another room. I wasn't their only child—I once had a baby brother, but he died when he was four months old. I know that my father took advantage of my mother, exploited her, and eventually abandoned us. He himself was ruined by their association—it's ironic, but hardly comforting."

She shifted in her seat, looking around at the faces. "You see, the exploitation part came several years into their relationship. It wasn't enough for him to have a pretty young mistress and a second family. He wanted to prove to the world that the paranormal was real. When I was still quite small, he set up a demonstration of her powers and invited his peers. Imagine if in the American South, a white, married university professor did that for his colored mistress, one with a deformed child by him, and you will understand that they did not go in with open minds. He was tone-deaf to that, however, and set everything up, a whole battery of impartial tests, making sure she was rehearsed and ready.

"I was there that day—I remember how beautiful my mother looked. She wore _chima jeogori_, that is, traditional Korean clothes, a high waisted full skirt with a loose jacket over it, pink and bright turquoise, and her hair was braided. I was in an outfit to match hers. The colors were so happy, but the room, the lecture hall we went into, wasn't. I had never been where there were so many men all in one place, and they all had on dark suits. Somehow it made me think of a forest, but I don't remember why. She put me down on the other side of the dais with a book to keep me occupied.

"I remember little about the tests themselves, except that that my mother would say these numbers and then someone would repeat them. I think she guessed what was in an envelope, and then the person would open it and announce the result. Books have always kept me involved. But I do remember that then some man got up and shouted 'You lying old fox bitch!' and that set the whole room off. They all started shouting 'Fake', 'Fraud', 'Liar', and 'Old Fox!' When a woman is called a fox here, I think it's a compliment, but in Korea, it's an insult. 'Old Fox' is about the worst insult there is, much worse than being called a bitch here.

"My mother got up so fast she knocked the chair over. A man threw something at her—just a little pocket notebook, I think, but his face was so ugly with anger—I hated him. Then there was blood coming out of his face and he fell down and my mother shouted, 'Joon-yi, no!', scooped me up, and ran from the room." She paused, visibly trembling a little, living a memory she had only just invented.

"I think I must have made him bleed and fall down. I'm not sure. He didn't die, I know, because it would have come back to us later. Everything else did. I never saw my father again after that day. He was ruined, a laughingstock, a disgrace. I heard later that he committed suicide. I don't know if that was true."

Erik dragged his attention away from his wife for a moment to look at the rest of the room, and saw that they were rapt. She had them. She had them all. At least for right now, they saw her as a person, not a mutant. Her vulnerability, her beauty, her eloquence—there was a lesson to be learned in this.

"After that, my mother went back to being a mudang, but there was something wrong with her. She had a shinbyeong, which translates to 'spirit sickness', but it's partly physical too. You'd call it a nervous breakdown. It's the kind of thing that happens to initiated mudang, not hereditary. It left her very fragile. She could barely eat anything, she had pains and cramping, and the difference between dream and reality got very blurry for her. That lasted eight years. They weren't good years. I started going to school, my grandmother died, and then came the withdrawal of the Japanese occupation.

"I'm sure you've seen newsreels of what happened after the war to those French girls who were the mistresses of Nazi officers—the 'collaborationists'. They had their heads shaved and were made to run naked through the streets while everyone screamed at them, hating them, hurting them. My mother had been the mistress of a Japanese man and I was their child. We were turned out of our home, out of our hereditary territory as mudang. Left homeless, we went wandering as itinerate mudang. By that time, I had my powers, and…if my mother was exceptional, I was something never dreamed of."

She picked up the bells without her prosthetics that time, made them ring in demonstration.

"The way you react here to people with paranormal abilities—saving you, Mr. Black—is strange and puzzling to me. You see, we've been here all along, and it's no big deal. We just try to get through life as best we can, like everyone else. In Japan, the shinobi—you call them ninja—there were whole clans of them with wide varieties of powers. Not any more—the shogun wiped out most of them.

"My mother and I did all right as wanderers, but I was not happy at all. I wanted to go to school. I wanted a regular home and everything that went with it—I was a whiny brat about it, in other words. Well, when my mother died over the winter of pneumonia, I had even less. A Catholic orphanage took me in for the sake of both my body and my soul. I was bright enough not to jeopardize my place among them, and—it could have been much worse. Some of the nuns were very kind, and I got to go to school. They would have liked it if I converted, but I wasn't forced into it.

"That was where I spent the Korean War, among them, and afterward the nuns supported me in my hopes of a higher education. I went to college, studied biochemistry and pharmacology, passed the licensing tests and became a pharmacist. We were now living in a modern world with no place for old superstitions like the mudang, and the authorities frowned on anyone who practiced.

"It wasn't easy to find a job, not in Seoul, not on the mainland—once I showed up for a job interview, and they took one look at me, saw the prostheses, and sent me away. I had the highest scores in my entire class!" she cried out. The entire room was silent, tribute to her skill as a storyteller.

"Finally I answered an ad for an assistant's position on Yeonpyeong Island, through the mail, and was accepted the same way. It turned out to be a very small pharmacy in a fishing village. It didn't matter. It helped that I was a mudang there, because there people still kept to the old ways, and I was very happy, actually. Useful and happy.

"Mr. Pak, the pharmacist, was quite an elderly man, over eighty. His hobby was hybridizing daylilies, but he also liked to play chess. He had rooms over the shop, and he let me stay there in exchange for some housekeeping and cooking. Since he was long past the age when he had any other use for a woman, we fell into the roles of grandfather and granddaughter. We played chess together in the shop when it was quiet, and in the evenings we listened to records on his phonograph. He had some very diverse records—Shakespeare plays in English, transcribed radio broadcasts from America. I learned English in school, but there was where I perfected it.

"Then—I mentioned that Mr. Pak hybridized daylilies. He worked with some dangerous chemicals, and wound up dying of cancer. I took… care of him to the end. Afterward, I found he left me the lease on the shop and all the contents. It was a generous bequest in that it was all he had, but the shop had barely made enough money to keep us. So I went to register the change with the appropriate authorities, and ran into trouble. A distant cousin of his challenged the will, and then my past came out. A deformed half-Japanese mudang, daughter of a notorious fraud?

"I wound up back in the orphanage, only now I was assisting in the classrooms, working in the infirmary, looking after the little ones, whatever needed to be done. I still was not willing to convert, but they wanted me to. Maybe I would have eventually. Then last year, three of the nuns were granted a chance to visit the Holy Land, to spend Easter in Jerusalem. Sister Mary Assumpta needed help, though. She had had a stroke, and so I was chosen to go along." She glanced over at him.

Erik sat up. "That's where I come into the story. As you know, I'm an Israeli citizen, and now and then I even live there. One day, I'm walking down a crowded sidewalk, pass a group of nuns, and brush up against someone who—I can't describe it. It would be like explaining color to a blind person, but I knew this was someone like me. Another mutant. I stop, turn around and there was…this young woman looking back at me. I'd never dreamed of meeting someone else like me, I thought I was alone in the world, and then there she was. And she had felt it too. We wound up at an all-night café, once she'd settled the sister down for the evening. And then the next day, and the next, any time she had an hour to herself. She took some convincing, but the day before she was supposed to return to Korea, we were married."

"I had never thought there was anything more to my powers than that I was a hereditary mudang. More powerful than most, perhaps," Joon-Yi put in. "To meet someone who wasn't one, who was a foreigner, and a man—. The nuns were not best pleased when I told them I was staying behind because I had just married a Jewish man after knowing him less than ten days, but since I was of age, they had to accept it. We have been working together ever since."

Mr. Black slapped the table. "I knew it. You two did a lousy job of pretending not to know each other."

"So you not only knew each other, you were already married?" McCone asked, the first time he had spoken to any mutant directly. "Then why the business today?"

"Because there was still Schmidt," Erik replied. "I had several strong leads. One of them was in Argentina, the other was Shaw. I didn't want to have to send her, but being who she is, she could get into the club and find out what he was up to, but if he was Schmidt, she couldn't go in as Mrs. Lensherr or have any paper trail that led back to me. It wasn't easy to arrange, but I eradicated it so thoroughly that it was easier to marry again than to try and prove we were already married. Now if she's answered to your satisfaction, might we return to the matter at hand?"

_I can't believe it_. Charles sent to him. _I didn't have to juice them at all. She—and you—pulled it off all on your own. No powers involved._

**Of course**, Erik replied. **We're exactly that good**.

TBC….


	41. Wreaking Havoc

"_You __are __an __artist_," Erik leaned over to breathe into Joon-Yi's ear.

"Thank you," she murmured back, putting the ghost bells away with as much care as if they truly were the only remnant of her family and childhood. A lie, when it was big enough, crossed over into the territory of myth, and myths were a form of truth, the same sort of truth as 'justice' 'equality', and 'freedom'—which was to say, they did not exist in nature, only in people's hearts and minds. One had to believe in them for them to exist at all. Civilizations were founded on myths. What would this myth of Joon-Yi's go on to found?

After that, the rest of the meeting was almost anticlimactic. Shaw had a meeting scheduled with Hendry's Soviet counterpart, so soon that they would have to leave in an hour's time to be certain they would get there. This was not hysteria on the CIA's part. Russia was an enormous country, and even knowing the exact location of the meeting would not make getting there any quicker, barring assistance from a teleporter.

"Shaw may not be there," Joon-Yi put forth. "He's been out of sight and out of touch for over a week now, and that is very uncharacteristic of him. He's extremely insecure for who he is; it isn't enough for him to be rich, to own yachts and automobiles and nightclubs and have a beautiful girlfriend. He has to be seen and envied, or he gets no pleasure from them. Going to ground as he has means he's scared—not of me or of the CIA, but of Erik and Charles. He may send someone in his place. Probably Emma Frost, as Azazel is too outré looking and Janos has hardly two brain cells firing at any one time."

"In that case, proceed with the mission as planned, but aim to capture rather than kill," McCone said. "Black, you have the authority to send whoever will be most effective provided they have security clearance. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen." It was not an about-face from his previous attitude toward mutants, but it was an improvement. Myths did indeed have power.

"Unfortunately, that means we can't bring Logan," Erik commented as their group, including Moira and Mr. Black, headed toward the mutant dormitory and the Rec room.

it was more of a wrecked room at the moment. Giddy with happiness at meeting more of their kind, the kids had gone wild, much to the detriment of the room. The big picture window looking out into the courtyard was gone, there were scorch marks on the walls surrounding the courtyard, the bronze statue of CIA founder William Donovan was in two pieces (the upper half was pitted as if by acid as well), Hank was swinging from the chandelier by his feet, Angel was flitting around the room in midair, Alex and Sean were pummeling Darwin with chairs, and Raven was doing the Twist.

"What on earth—." Charles spluttered. "Raven, what is going on here? What happened to that statue? And the window?" Black and Moira seemed frozen in horror and dismay.

"No, no no. I'm Mystique now. And you're Professor X—and you have to be Magneto—and you're _definitely_ Chimera," She pointed at Charles, Erik and Joon-Yi in turn, then hiccupped. "Sorry, too much soda pop."

"You do all realize that clean-up and repair are going to come out of your pay, don't you?" Joon-Yi's amused voice cut through the general hilarity. "They're going to wind up owning you at this rate."

That brought the party to a screeching halt as the young mutants looked around at the mess for the first time. "If you do your best to clean up, I bet it won't cost you as much. Excuse me, I've got to go change and pack." She exited toward the bedrooms.

"Who was that?" Angel asked, hovering to a halt as the boys left off their horseplay and started to put the furniture back in order (and in some cases back together).

"That's Joon-Yi. You'll like her, she's great." Raven predicted. "Oh, man—where's there a broom?"

At that moment Logan appeared. "Some dust-up. And I can't even smell a drop of booze." He surveyed the room and its occupants. "So, which of these guys is the one who deserves to die a virgin?" he asked Raven, whose jaw dropped.

Sean, Hank and Alex turned bright red. Darwin only shrugged. "Too late for it to be me."

Mr. Black regained some of his usual spirit, but he still looked grave, which did not suit his face. "Gentlemen, Moira, a word with you?"

Shortly after that word, Erik (not in the best mood, but then he rarely was) knocked on the door to Joon-Yi's room, saying "It's me." He had been given bad news to deliver, and was not looking forward to it.

The recruits were not going, that was clear from the moment Mr. Black had clapped eyes on the chaos—but he was leery of having them stay behind unsupervised by a more mature adult mutant. (No one was willing to put Logan into the same sentence as being 'more mature'.)

Joon-Yi had gotten along very well with Raven over the past week and had even sorted out the rest just then without raising her voice. In addition to which, she did not speak Russian and had no combat training, so it followed that she was Black's first choice to deal with the unruly kids. As her husband, it followed that he was their first choice to deliver that news.

"Come on in," her voice drifted out to him. "I could really use your help. I hate clasps."

He went in, and saw her—in what she had worn under the crimson suit, which was black lace over blue satin and not a lot of either. She was trying to undo the pearl choker from around her neck, and having no luck. "I have to give these back to Raven," she explained. "It was my 'something borrowed.'"

"Here, let me. No wonder you're having trouble, you've got your hair caught in it. Hold still." She did as he worked the long black strands out from the filigree. "They suit you perfectly, though. I'll get you a strand like it, with an easier catch…When Schmidt is dead and this present crisis is over, we'll go away together, properly."

"Somewhere where there's no telephone, no television, no telepaths, no tele-_anything_," she agreed.

"That island I told you about has none of those things," he told her. She smiled, and he could feel a little tremor of laughter ripple through her. "I get the sense you don't believe me!"

"Having you is more than generous of fate. A private island in the Bermudas as well would be too much to ask of one lifetime. I'm not greedy."

"But I am. There, it's done." The clasp popped open. She caught the necklace with her 'hands' as he brushed a kiss on the nape of her neck and then—this was, this should have been their wedding night. Instead he was going to the other side of the world while she was staying here. And who knew when he would return? So he turned the kiss into a nuzzle, undoing another catch, the one at the center of her back. Lingerie was pretty, lingerie was nice, but ultimately it was like gift wrap, and what was underneath was what really mattered, and underneath this were breasts like a pair of champagne cups, delicate and perfect, rose-tipped, liquidy and warm under his hands.

"Now?" she asked, turning her head up to his face, surprised but not at all displeased.

"Now," he confirmed, and the bed was right there. What followed would probably have happened exactly that way even if they had all night instead of these stolen minutes. Again, Joon-Yi surprised him. He had thought he was going to start a fire without even a match, but it turned out that everything had been drenched in lighter fluid.

He told her so, adding "and don't you dare apologize!", which made her laugh, and making love with laughter (and that was what this was, _making __love_) only made it better, it brought joy to a hurried feast, and added to their mutual satisfaction.

Afterward, she said 'It's probably for the best that I didn't have this distracting me before now. My grades would have gone all to pieces!"

He laughed too. "I know you're inclined to blame the paroxetine, but has it occurred to you that part of the problem may have been that he was the wrong species?"

"Some day I am going to wrestle out of you exactly what I said under codeine. He was definitely wrong, species or not. Now, I would like nothing more than to lay here all night with you like this, but we've forty-one minutes until the Eagle flies, and I have to pack, so—."

"Ah," he said. "About that—." He explained why she had been tapped to stay behind, and felt her stiffen up as he spoke.

"So I'm supposed to baby-sit them with no say in the matter?"

"It is not my decision. Black has the ultimate say. We need not comply at all; it's simply easier to make use of their resources, and there he holds sway."

"Was this your way of softening me up?" she asked, and there was a hint of anger in it.

"No! Truly, no. It was more my way of softening _me_ up." He gestured, and she chortled despite herself.

"Last week with Raven was one thing," she said slowly, "and Hank has a job, but adding five more to the mix—. What am I going to do with them?"

"Anything that will keep them from destroying property, people and themselves."

She stayed stiff a moment longer before relaxing. "All right. For the sake of amicable relations with our host and under protest. Charles gets to do the sitting next time around; _he's_ the professional educator, not me. Now _you_ have thirty-seven minutes until you're right back on a plane, and I'm going to take a quick shower."

He buttoned, tucked, zipped and otherwise restored his clothing before he left the room to face the concerned looking Moira and Black plus a somewhat wild-eyed Charles. "It's all right. You have your baby sitter. Now I have a bag to unpack and repack."

He left, but Charles still had something to say, albeit mentally. _You __might __have __warned __me._

**Sorry. It was the heat of the moment.**

_Even a brief 'Close your mind!' would have sufficed._

**I said I was sorry! How did you ever get through college and university with all that goes on there?**

_By __living __off __campus. __Far, __far __off __campus_.

* * *

><p>AN: Yep, I saw Shame over the weekend. As far as I'm concerned, Michael Fassbender should go naked anywhere and anywhen he pleases. Happy Holidays, and remember: Reviews are the only pay ficwriters get.


	42. Parting

So it seems as though I get to resolve all my identity issues in one week, and considering that I carried around that baggage for more than two decades, that's pretty good work. (I may also have to rethink my wardrobe. I've never gotten so many compliments as I did while wearing my wedding suit. Clearly dressing Asian works for me—yet I would hate to descend to cliché.)

The whole species issue, mutant vs. nonmutant was always the bigger of the two, but I had racial identity issues as well. There are two ways Caucasian parents usually deal with the issue of an Asian adoptee's race: either they ignore it and pretend the kid is white, or they do what my folks did, which was to sign me up for all sorts of classes in Korean language, culture and history.

Obviously a lot of it stuck, but the problem with the second approach is that it did nothing to prepare me for being an Asian-_American_. What I really needed was to hang out with other Asian-Americans who were not adoptees, but like I said, personally and socially my species identity was much more of an issue and nobody shoved my head down a toilet because I was Asian. _That _would have been politically incorrect and insensitive. Instead I learned about being Korean, and not even about being a Korean-American.

So what good did all those classes do? Other than provide me with a cipher for keeping a diary, that is. Well, I can make a mean dish of bulgogi, and that's about it.

Yet when the chips were down, where did I turn to? Those classes. And horror movies, mainly Ringu, the first Whispering Corridors and of course A Tale of Two Sisters. From them I wove a lie so big it started to take on a life of its own. For all I know I _am_ half Japanese and descended of generations of mudang.

The problem is, though, that there is zero evidence to back up my story, and if the CIA can overcome the language barrier and the USA's sensitive relationship with South Korea, they will rapidly figure out this was all a fabrication on my part. Whatever understanding between humans and mutants I may have brought into being will crumple like a tissue flower at the touch of rain when that happens. At the moment they have more important things on their mind, but that may not always be the case... I may need to appeal to Charles for help there.

So then we learned about Shaw's next phase in his plan to bring about global destruction, which is to bring in the Soviets, after which we returned to our rooms to pack in preparation for our mission. Except that wasn't what happened. First, the kids were bouncing off the walls, and then...

As I've stated before, there are some things I will not commit to these pages because they are too personal, too intimate for the eyes of any other person. Therefore, you can go elsewhere for your one-handed reading material. I am not telling you about the consummation of our marriage. Besides, if by chance these notebooks are found and decrypted by one of our kids or grandkids, I don't want to be accused of inflicting parental-sex-life detail trauma on you from beyond the grave. You can go on secure in the happy conviction that after this one time, we only did it once for every genetic child in the family and we didn't enjoy it _at all_.

Snicker.

After which, I learned that I was not going to Russia. I was on the verge of making something out of that, when it occurred to me that if I couldn't handle this, how was I going to handle marriage and eventually motherhood? This could hardly be the worst situation that would ever be thrown at me. Therefore I decided to make the best of it and took a shower.

A very sincere and devout Buddhist once told me the reason I was born without arms is that in previous lives, I held on to both things and people too tightly. If that is so, for I have many problems with reincarnation, then the lesson did not take, because the prospect of parting even temporarily from Erik was horribly painful. Knowing exactly what brain chemicals were making me feel this way did not lessen that by a whit.

I dressed again in clothes more appropriate for helping clean a rec room, picked up a book, and went out to walk down to the covert hangar and the stealth aircraft that were reserved for missions such as this, and while we walked (there were other people around us, but I hardly noticed them), I did not take my eyes off Erik. Normally I am quite a good observer, able to recall all kinds of details, but on this occasion I can only tell you that the corridor had a floor, walls, a ceiling, and there was some kind of lighting.

"Was your hair silvery fair when you were a baby?" I asked, "It looks as though it might have been." I was not about to say what I really wanted to say, not in front of all these people, so I talked about whatever popped into my head.

"Yes, it was," he replied. "Courtesy of that Scandinavian great-grandfather responsible for my name. You needn't worry you missed anything, because it's likely to go silver again within the decade. The men in my family always go grey before they're forty."

"That could be dangerous," I joked, "You have no right to get even better looking than you are now. It would be very inconsiderate of you." It was a good thing I had the eye patch off, because otherwise navigating these corridors without looking directly where I was going would have been difficult.

"I'm afraid it's too late to object," he said, but his eyes were smiling at me, "because you're stuck with me now. You've got fifty years of me ahead of you, you know."

"I look forward to every single one of them," I said, "What made that little scar on your forehead, the fleck hidden in the crease between your eyes?"

"This one?" he asked, pointing. "Chicken pox. Do you want me to bring you some Russian tea, if I find any good kinds?"

"No," I replied. "No. Bring me nothing back, so long as you bring yourself… I know you won't be able to call like before."

"I will," he said. "It will be all right. I fully expect that Schmidt will not be there, and that we will wind up dragging that skimmed milk creature of his back here."

"Oh," I said, because I realized I had that book under my arm, the one I meant to give him ever since he said he hadn't read it. "This is for you to read on the plane. You're going all the way to Russia, you have to have something to read. I couldn't find a German version or the French original, so you'll have to plod through it in English." We reached the hangar, stepped out into the vast, echoing space.

"Thank you," He took it, read the title, and said. "The Count of Monte Cristo- You said I was like Edmond."

"And so you are," I told him. "But I refuse to be Haydee. I am not so poor and weak a creature that I faint upon tearing up a piece of paper. Nor even at parting from you." I was not near to crying, no, not even near it. My eyes were not stinging, my throat not swelling up nor my voice growing squeaky.

"It's a long book," he said consolingly. "I am certain to be back before I'm done with it." We paused at the stairs up to the plane, and his voice dropped low, meant for only me to hear. "There is something I have not said to you yet. It won't sound true to me in any other language. _Ich liebe dich_."

I don't know much German, but I understand that much. Some things don't need translating. We kissed farewell, and then he was on board and gone, along with Charles and Moira and the CIA team, and I was left to wipe my face.

All right, it was time to pull myself together and enough with the soppiness. The evolution will be televised, and I refuse to resemble a whiny helpless heroine. There was work to be done.

When I returned to the rec room, the kids were doing their best to clean up. Hank had even gone to his lab and come back with a welding torch, which he was using on the statue while a dark-skinned young man held it in place, while two other kids were sweeping up the broken window and Raven and the dancer were cleaning up the soda and popcorn. "Hey, don't toss out the window glass, I want to try something first," I called.

Mr. Black was still monitoring the situation, and now he strolled over to say, "Mrs. Lensherr, I just want to say I do appreciate what you're doing for us, and if there's anything I can do to help, just say the word."

"Actually, there is," I replied. "First of all, if the phrase 'the ways of my people' ever crosses my lips, promise me you will pour a bucket of very cold water over my head." That made him chuckle, which was my intent.

"And the second is- -while there has been nothing as yet which I would call an 'incident', some of your people have...objected to sharing the facilities with Raven and me. If you could, please issue a general memo to the effect that this is a center for paranormal research and if anyone cannot cope with the presence of persons with paranormal abilities, they should perhaps consider a transfer to another division. I believe an official statement of policy would go a long way toward making our stay here pleasanter for everyone."

"I will do that," he said, his eyes crinkling with concern. "Except I won't say 'perhaps' they should 'consider' a transfer."

The humans don't have to like us, but I will damn well make them respect us.

…Where did Erik get the idea that we will spend fifty years together? Was it something he pulled out of the air?

* * *

><p>AN: This chapter took far too long to come together and it's a little short. Still, here it is, and I hope it meets with your approval. If you celebrated, I hope your holidays were happy. As for me—well, thanks to an emergency root canal and vet bills, it was frugal but happy. My cat is still alive and still enjoying some quality of life as of this writing, which is good. It's a waiting game. Ringu, the Japanese original (and far superior) movie, was remade as The Ring in America. Ringu Zero, a prequel to it, is also excellent. Whispering Corridors is a South Korean horror movie series set in various girls' high schools. Bulgogi is Korean-style barbequed beef.

A very Happy New Year to you all! Good ficcing in 2012!


	43. Playing Nice

Beside him, Moira thumbed through a fashion magazine; around them, the rest of the team was napping, reading, checking portions of their gear, and Charles Xavier was thinking. There, on his other side, sat Erik, reading The Count Of Monte Cristo, a book Charles had read when he was twelve, albeit in an abridged and expurgated form (which was to say, without the hashish, the adultery, the lesbians, the infanticide, etc.).

He had not allowed himself to dwell on what he had seen of the future through Joon-Yi. How could he relate to Erik and Raven normally if he did? But now… He had to hope that something he could do would help to make a difference, that Joon-Yi was right to throw her lot in with Erik as thoroughly as she had, and that she would not turn to terrorism herself. She did love Erik very much, and he, Charles... was left out in the cold. If only he hadn't recoiled when he saw her arms! That first and only kiss had been quite nice, and she had looked very lovely indeed in that red suit.

The real reason he'd thought she was trouble was because he couldn't tell what she was thinking or what she was going to do before she did it. It was a little late to realize that being with someone whose mind he didn't always have to block out would be, in fact, a very good thing. That way there would always be surprises.

Well, he knew that what he felt right now towards Joon-Yi was colored by Erik's feelings for her. This would fade, and the sooner the better. He hadn't wanted to eavesdrop on what they were doing back there, but as telepathy was more like hearing than reading, it was sometimes very, very difficult to turn your attention elsewhere. Especially when _that_ was going on.

Erik sat forward, perusing a certain section intently. " 'Perhaps what I am about to say will appear strange to you gentlemen, socialists, progressives and humanists that you are, but I never worry about my neighbor, I never try to protect a society which does not protect me—indeed, might I add, which generally takes no heed of me except to do me harm—and since I hold them low in my esteem and remain neutral toward them, I believe that society and my neighbor are in my debt,'" he quoted.

"Neutrality is an attitude which I can live with," Charles commented. "Enjoying it? I always preferred The Three Musketeers myself. You ought to try that one when you're done with this, if you haven't read it either. I personally prefer friendship to revenge."

"It's not so much about revenge as it is about justice," Erik refuted. "The Count is an agent of God's will in the world; or so I understand thus far. He harms no innocent person; in fact, he returns good for the good done to his father tenfold. I'm quite engrossed in it. It's not great literature, but it is superbly entertaining."

"Oh, I don't know. Where does one draw the line between literature and entertainment? Does a work have to be one or the other, not both? I would argue that The Once and Future King is both."

"I haven't read it. A children's book, isn't it?" Erik raised an eyebrow.

"Only in the sense that the alphabet is for children."

"Speaking of children, I wonder how they're getting along at the moment. It must be—," Erik checked his watch, "mid-afternoon there."

"I think I'm happier_ not_ knowing." Charles grimaced.

* * *

><p>Back at the CIA base: "C'mon, don't just stand there and throw punches! Move your goddamn feet when ya fight, Hank! This ain't the playground!" Logan scowled, following it up with several cuffs to his opponent's head.<p>

Hank ducked and dodged well enough, but he was staying within a square yard of mat space as if he were playing four square. Meanwhile, Darwin and Sean were off in the corner practicing on the punching bags while the rest of the recruits waited for their turns with Logan. Joon-Yi was making notes in a little book she carried around with her, some kinda chickenscratch.

Angel yawned and crossed her legs. She wasn't sure how much of this training and lessons and crap she was gonna put up with. She'd signed up figuring she could use a paid vacation from stripping for a while. Somehow she never could save up enough to take a couple of weeks off on her own, as stripping wasn't exactly the kind of job that offered benefits. Plus the whole secret agent thing sounded kinda cool and those cats Erik and Charlie looked as if they had dough and to spare. If she'd known when she signed up there was gonna be all this learning like in school, plus both Raven and Joon-Yi, who went around acting like their shit didn't stink—well, she'd have thought twice about it.

The real shocker was that Joon-Yi was Erik's old lady, with papers to prove it, all real and legal. What she wanted to know was, how did _that_ chick with her itty bitty chest and no arms ever manage _that_? Her skin wasn't any lighter than Angel's, and even if she did have better hair, her nose was nothing to write home about.

Of course, it probably didn't hurt that Joon-Yi didn't have to spit acid on her food and wait for it to liquefy so she could drink it, which was what Angel had to do. Not being able to digest food in her stomach no matter how she chewed it tended to limit her dating life a lot.

"How many times do I have to tell ya, move your feet!" Logan shouted.

"They're too big to move, that's his problem," Alex taunted from the sidelines.

"Right!" Logan stabbed a finger at the blond kid. "You. Get over here. Maybe Hank doesn't really want ta fight me, and that's part of it. But he'll really want ta hit ya, won't he?"

"Uh—I don't think I ought to be fighting anybody—," Alex muttered. "My powers—."

"Yeah? That's his look out. Motivation ta move his feet. Joon-Yi's thing is ta keep ya from hurting anybody else. Okay, Raven. Your turn. Uh—you're wearing clothes, right?"

"Yes," Raven said, and turned blue to prove that, yes, the white pajama karate gear was fabric and not her. Stepping on to the mat, she and Logan faced each other, circling around. "Who goes fir—?" she began, but Logan struck first. She blocked his fist with her arm, counterstriking with a kick to his stomach.

He seized her ankle, twisted, brought her down on the mat. She countered with a sweeping kick meant to cut his feet out from under him, but he wasn't there. Rearing up like an enormous blue cobra, she ducked under his haymaker to elbow him under the arm, which made him laugh.

"Not bad. You got potential, Red. Where'd ya train?"

"My—name is not Red!" she gritted, "and Charles made me go to self-defense classes. SO! There!"

In a flurry of moves, Raven struck out, was blocked, then countered up with a knee to the groin, but Logan was too fast for her. Next thing she knew, Raven was face down on the mat with Logan bending one arm up behind her back, straddling her. They were both breathing hard, and his arms were solid with muscle. She was pinned.

Then, with a popping sound and a move that had to have pulled her arm out of its socket, Raven jabbed him hard in the jaw with her elbow, snapping his head up. Rolling over, she delivered a knee to his solar plexus, slithered up, dancing back and then toward him again to kick him in his knee.

Instead he turned the move into a hip throw, but she regained advantage by making it a flip. He moved with her, tumbling together on the mat. He wound up on top, and for a moment they froze there, staring into each others' eyes.

"So what's my name?" he asked. He wasn't resting his weight on her. In fact, he wasn't touching her at all, but locked in place as if he had paused during push-ups.

"The only one I know is Logan. Can I get up now?"

"Nah. I wanna know what codename you're gonna give me. Everyone else has one, and I don't want you leavin' me out."

"Oh, Charles came up with the perfect one for you. Wolverine, because they're all stench and aggression," she retorted.

"Wolverine. I can live with that. They're scrappy, kinda like me, and I get the feeling _you_ kinda like me too." Raven would have found that push-up pose unbearably painful by now, but he seemed like he could stay there all day.

"I don't know where you're getting that idea," she replied.

At that moment, there was a 'thwack', a red flash, and Hank shouted "Watch it!" while Joon-Yi hollered "Whoa!" The diminutive girl went skidding over the floor belly down, so hard her hooks left scratches on the boards while red ball lightning sizzled around the room until it went out like a candle someone snuffed with their fingers.

Both Raven and Logan sprang up and apart. "Are you all right?" She hurried over to Joon-Yi, who was lying in a heap against the far wall.

"Oh, sure. I got a shield up in time and I managed to contain his burst. I wasn't expecting to go flying, that's all. Now I know how a billiard ball must feel…"

"What the hell were you doing?" Logan swore at Hank and Alex. Hank was looking from Raven to Logan with a kicked-puppy expression on his face. Alex, on the other hand, was helping Joon-Yi up and apologizing.

"All right. You two, hit the bags. Darwin, Sean, you're up…."

And so it went.

* * *

><p>AN: This chapter is for Bub23453, who wanted some Logan/Raven, and Crystalfeathers, who wanted some action. Sadly, it is also a bit short, but hey, it's a chapter.

Unfortunately, my cat had to be put to sleep on January 2nd. The vet said that it's common with chronic kidney failure that an animal may seem to rally right before the end, and he was having seizures. He lived to make it to fifteen years, and I have to say they were wonderful years for me and I believe for him too. Thank you all for your kind words concerning him.


	44. Icebound

Somewhere icebound: "Listen to this," Sebastian Shaw ordered Emma Frost, pressing a button on a recorder. She arranged her face into something suitably neutral, and heard:

'_Shall I tell them now?'_ It was Jenny Song's voice, sounding younger and more timid than was her wont.

'_Yes, dear. It does not matter now._' That was Erik Lensherr.

"So they _were_ working together!" Emma exclaimed.

"More than that," Shaw said, having paused the tape. "This is from a_ very_ secret division of the CIA."

He resumed playback, and they listened as Jenny (or, rather, Joon-Yi) recounted a rather different version of her life story than anything she had told them, up until she went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as nursemaid/companion to an elderly nun. Then Erik Lensherr took over, seamlessly and convincingly talking of how he had met her by chance, recognized what she was, and married her within days. Emma gritted her teeth when he talked about how she had infiltrated the Club.

"How romantic," she drawled when Shaw stopped the recording.

"You're missing the point. Now we know how she fooled us and lied to you. You heard her—she comes from a long line of psychics and shamans. I'm sure she has a whole bag of tricks she picked up from her foremothers. Also, her line not only breeds true, at least on the female side, it's also growing stronger with successive generations. That interests me a great deal." He paused. "Darling, I am about to do something I hardly ever do."

"What might that be?" she asked, right on cue.

"Admit I might have been wrong about something. It seems that Erik Lensherr has developed an irrational hatred toward me. I may have made a mistake all those years ago. I should have singled out _both_ Herr Lensherr and Frau Lensherr. That way I could have killed the father in front of him and kept the mother in reserve. You can only kill someone once, but the combination of fear and gratitude—. It's all blood in the water now, or water under the bridge, whatever the saying is."

"Is there any more to that tape?" Emma asked.

"Nothing that bears playing back,"(Shaw was not about to play back Joon-Yi's psychological insights into his character). "However, they know about that little meeting with the Russian, and Jenny guessed that it will be you and not me who shows up. Even as we speak, she, their telepath, Erik and a number of CIA monkeys are swooping in to crash the party." Shaw's information was detailed, but he had made an error, assuming Joon-Yi was the one woman on the plane.

He continued, "Of all the mutants Erik Lensherr could have bumped into, it had to be one with a scientist father and a psychic mother…That's a dangerous combination, logic and precognition in one."

"So, what now? Cancel, postpone, change the place or the time?" Emma twirled a tress of her champagne colored hair around one finger and watched Sebastian.

He shook his head. "No. There've been enough delays already. Also, if we alter our plans, they'll know they have a leak, and it's such a useful one. You'll go as planned—."

"All on my own?" she protested playfully. "And they say chivalry is dead."

"Or you could see it as a vote of confidence in your abilities. No, I wouldn't risk a hair on your head, dearest Emma. You'll go, but with one difference. I've arranged for a bodyguard for you, and he should be here…about now." He made a show of checking his watch. "Care to come topside with me to meet him?"

"A bodyguard?" she scoffed, standing up and tugging her skirt back into place. "Some sweaty normal with a gun that'll be useless once any of those three looks at him?"

"Hardly," Shaw replied. "This one doesn't rely on guns and he brings his own knives—which are not made of metal. Nor is he a normal. Sweaty—that I can't answer for."

"_And_ need I remind you we're in the center of an impassable ice field, hundreds of miles from land or a landing field? How is this bodyguard supposed to get here?" she asked, but flirtatiously, smiling at him.

"If he can't get here, then he's not the man for the job." They went up into the sail, lifting the hatch to look out around their locale, a field of monochrome stretching as far as they could see.

"I hate to tell you this, Sebastian, but when I can't detect a mind out there, there's nothing to detect," Emma said, looking around. Even Jenny/Joon-Yi had been a presence, not a void in her telepathy. Except—she almost frowned. There was something out there, not a human or mutant-like mind, amorphous and complex. This was something simpler, more direct and focused, a large predator of some kind.

"Here," Shaw extended a pair of binoculars. She took them, looked in the direction of that mind.

"Ah!" A face came into view, framed in a hood lined with pale fur. It was squarish, masculine in the extreme, framed with thick mutton chop whiskers. Steely eyes glinted at her, lips peeling back from monstrously large canines. Then it dropped out of sight. She realigned the binoculars, found him again. He had dropped to all fours and was running toward them over the ice and snow. He should have been laughable, awkward and inefficient as bipeds were when moving on hands and feet both, but he wasn't. He moved like a lowlands gorilla—or better still, like the largest of cats. Fast, fluid, and feral…

He loomed too large in the glasses now, and she dropped them as he leapt for the sail, pulled himself up between them. "You Shaw?" he rumbled, looking at Sebastian. He was not just tall, at least six and a half feet tall, but large enough to rock and sway the submarine with his weight.

"Yes. You're Creed?"

The behemoth nodded. "S'right. Victor Creed. We gonna jaw up here freezing our asses off or are we gonna go inside?"

"Inside, please. Be my guest." Sebastian moved aside to allow the larger man to go first. Azazel and Riptide both stared at the newcomer, who took up more room in the watercraft than both of them put together. Ushering him into the cabin, Shaw opened the meeting by pouring Emma and himself a couple of fingers of Lagavulin whiskey before offering some to Creed. Creed accepted by taking the entire decanter and drinking from the bottle.

"So what's the job?" rasped the visitor.

"Bodyguarding," Shaw replied.

"'S' not my kind of gig. I don't guard bodies. I make 'em dead."

"Patience. There is more to it. I'll pay whatever price you name, and more than that. I can give you what you want. I know where your brother James is."

"I'm listening."

"To earn that information, you will escort Miss Frost here to a very important meeting with a top Soviet official and make sure she returns alive and unharmed. Don't damage any of the Russians in the process; I still need them…is something wrong?"

His guest's attention had gone to a painting on the wall. Now he pointed to it with a clawed hand. "How much didya pay for that?"

"That? Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It's a Gauguin…"

"I know who that is. Asshole banker who lost all his money and ran off to Tahiti to fuck fourteen-year-old frails and paint. You got conned. That's a fake. The oil base in those paints is no more'n forty years old. I can smell it. The brushstrokes are too careful, too. I'm tellin ya this because I don't do these jobs for the money. I got money. I do these jobs because I got to kill now and then. I also got fifty years on you, _Schmidt_. I was born in 1830. I don't care for bein' patronized cause I don't talk pretty. I don't give a shit what people think, least of all you. I'll take your money and do your job, but I'm doing this for Jimmy. And if you don't come through, after, then we'll stack my healing factor and my powers against your healing factor and your powers and see who's the fittest. Got that clear in your head?"

"Abundantly." Sebastian said, his smile slipping.

"Right. So. I can't kill the Russians and I can't kill or fuck the frail. Who do I get to kill?" Creed took another swing of ruinously expensive Scotch and sat back.

"There will be CIA. You can kill as many of them as you want. There will be three mutants with them—." Sebastian produced a file, pulled out photographs, two blurry telephoto shots and one glossy Hellfire Club publicity shot. "This is Charles Xavier. He's a telepath. Kill him if you want to; I don't need him. He's weak and sentimental. This is Erik Lensherr. His power is magnetism, and he is _very_ powerful. He's not afraid to kill, not like Xavier. I want _him_ alive and not permanently damaged. If that means he gets away for now, so be it. This is his wife, Jenny or Joon-Yi Song. She has a form of telekinesis, some precognition, and a few other mental tricks. Don't let her go near water, or you'll lose her. She is also very eloquent and persuasive—don't believe anything she says and watch your vital signs because she can kill you without you noticing."

"Not me," Creed averred. "Dead or alive?"

"Alive and unharmed. I want to talk to her about her family—past and future."

* * *

><p>AN: So I sat down to write the chapter where Charles and Erik capture Emma and I was worse than uninspired by the result. I was bored. I needed things to play out differently than the movie, so I thought—how can I mix this up? Well, since I brought in Logan, thus giving the good guys a major advantage, I thought it was only fair to even things up again. While I was not thrilled by X-Men Origins: Wolverine, (I mean, Logan's hair was practically a life form in and of itself. I know the movie was set in the 70's, but still! And I wanted to puke when Kayla spared Stryker.) Liev Schreiber made a great Sabertooth, though.

Yes, this does make for another teasingly short chapter. I am sorry. It was a very long and depressing week. On the plus side, this chapter should bump me up over the hundred thousand word count. Any chance of getting my reviews up to 300? The only pay fanfic writers get are reviews.


	45. Bad Ideas

On Shaw's luxuriously appointed private jet, Emma Frost sat across from Victor Creed, considering him from under her eyelashes.

At first mental glance, she had taken Victor Creed's mind for that of a large predator, perhaps a bear or a killer whale (she was unsure of what could be up there on or under the ice). A second glance had confirmed rather than contradicted that first impression. Instead of being preoccupied with random thoughts as most people's were, human or mutant, his mind was filled up with sensation. All his senses were preternaturally intense and vivid, so much so that she had difficulty processing all the input.

Underneath that, however, was a mind like a prybar-steely hard, cold, and designed to crack things open. He intrigued her, not least for the raw, powerful masculinity he exuded. Quite a contrast to Shaw's increasingly stale efforts-they had been together some time now and she was growing rather tired of triggering his memories to turn him on and get him off.

She decided to break the silence. "Good job on taking Sebastian down a notch," Emma offered with her best smile, "A little humiliation will be good for him."

The lion-like mutant stirred. "You wanta screw?" he asked.

"No!" Emma replied, not entirely truthful about it.

"Then you'll wanta keep yer mouth shut. Let me put it to you straight. You're a whore. You dress like a whore, you smell like a whore, you look like a whore, and you act like one. Your man is loaning you out like one, too. I'm down on whores, always have been."

"I'm not—." Emma began, incensed. "Sebastian is not 'loaning me out'. With my powers—."

"That ain't what I mean. Shuttup." Victor Creed went back to staring out the window at clouds.

She let him for a few seconds while she reached out, tickled certain places in his brain.

"Quit doin' that." he growled over at her. Good—he'd felt the obvious attack, but not her more insidious mental tendrils. Get him talking first, that was it. Then get her hooks in.

"I'm sorry," she looked down, demurely. "You make me uneasy."

"You're safe enough from me now, but after the job's done-if Schmidt doesn't follow through, you're gonna be collateral damage. If he does, then I won't give a damn either way. Yer not that important."

"You care a lot about your brother," she observed, probing around some more.

"Neither of us got anybody else in the world," he replied. "Not anyone who lasts, anyhow."

"So he's like you?"she asked.

"Some ways yes, others no. He's runtier'n me, got less sense and less instinct. That's cause of his mama, not his fault whose cunt he slid out of. She was a whore, one from a fancy family and with a husband, but a whore all the same. You're from a fancy family yourself. The Frosts of Massachusetts, right?"

"Yes." She had got him talking now, was starting to unravel him. "So you have the same father but different mothers."

"'S right. Our father had a wife, my mama. She was a pretty thing when she was young, leastways that's how I remember. Back then my father was working on building a house for James Howlett. He was a rich man, Howlett. Made his pile, bought up a parcel of good farmland and forest and thought nothing of turning the one into flower gardens and the other into house timbers for his bride, who was from a fancy family back in England. It was good work, put food on the table and whiskey in the jar.

"Then the house was done, and Howlett sailed off to fetch his frail home. My father took one look at her and he went crazy, or near it. Y'see, she had soft smooth hands and fine, pale skin. My mother had hands rough like sandpaper and a face burned brown and going coarse, but then she had to wash clothes and butcher hogs and haul water in all kinds of weather. Mrs. Howlett had servants for everything. She lifted nothing heavier than a teapot and only picked up a needle to do fancy work. Didn't much care for her husband, neither. Maybe because he was her husband and so spreading her legs for him was a duty and too much like work. Instead her eyes lit on my father.

"Within six months, she was finding all kinds of odd jobs for him to do around the place, always off somewhere private and comfy. Everybody knew but Mr. Howlett. Problem was, her odd jobs didn't pay for more than whiskey, because she mostly was paying him in kind instead of in cash. My mother took ill and died more of overwork than anything, and then Mrs. Howlett started bigging up with a baby. That was my brother Jimmy. After that, she cut my father off and things got worse. It ended with our Pa shooting Mr. Howlett and Jimmy killing Pa and then Mrs. Howlett picked up a shotgun and put paid to her life.

"So when I say a whore, what I mean is, a woman who expects to get everything in life by being pretty and spreading her legs and never turns her hand to real work. How many seams you sewn, or meals you cooked, or floors you scrubbed, Miss Frost?"

"Not many." she admitted.

"Whore." he rasped.

It wasn't that she _couldn't_ go through his psyche, break him and bridle him mentally. She could, now that she had the measure of him. But if she did…she could never stop, never relax again. It was like that old saying, 'He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.'

He had lived so long already, his misogyny against 'bad' women was so entrenched that she could never root it out. She had seen enough in men's minds not to be shocked by what they thought about her and what they wanted to do to her, but Victor Creed was enough to make her cringe.

Better to retreat now while she still could.

Besides, she had just remembered where she encountered the phrase 'I am down on whores' before.

It was a message written by Jack the Ripper.

* * *

><p>So we all seem to have survived Day 2 of my Adventures in Babysitting, hooray.<p>

If the kids (with the exception of Hank) were big readers I might have been able to teach them something but if they were big readers, then I wouldn't have to do anything but put them in proximity to books. Other than that, about the only thing I could do is teach them how to make extremely volatile and dangerous explosives and poisonous gasses out of common household items—that was one of the most fascinating things about science for me when I was a kid—but that strikes me as not the kind of thing I ought to teach them. It smacks too much of terrorism for one, and they might try out the formulas on their own, which defeats the purpose of having me stay and keep them out of trouble.

Is it possible that I am too well qualified for anything but the Dark Side?

My plan, such as it is, is to keep them so busy during the day that they collapse at night. To this end, I enlisted Logan with five hundred dollars and the opportunity to be around Raven all day. He agreed readily.

So today it was the obstacle course. Logan fell quite naturally into the role of drill sergeant while I was on hand to offer encouragement, guidance and bottles of juice at the end. Although it was Sunday and even the CIA staff mostly sticks to normal office hours, Hank came in anyway, just like yesterday.

Watching Logan and Raven snark-flirt with each other (martial and marital are such similar words, after all) is excruciating for him, but he would rather be there when it goes on than stay away and let his imagination, if nothing else, run rampant. How long will it be before he moves onto the base to be here 24-7?

Well, the good news vis-à-vis Dr. McCoy is that I no longer want to drag him into closets and molest him. The bad news is that I want to smack him upside the head repeatedly. You see, as I am a PhD, a scientific colleague and now also Raven's best friend, he has taken me into his confidence in matters of the heart. This has got to stop.

"I'm nearing a breakthrough on the serum," he half-wailed. "It's just a matter of time!"

Hank had already run the course to Logan's satisfaction and was hanging out with me under a sycamore tree while Darwin took his run. Our omni-adapter was making good time, only slowing when new challenges required adjustments.

"Look, Hank, asking Raven to wait an unknown length of time for a serum that might or might not work is not something you can do at the stage your relationship is in right now. All you are is friends. Besides, the only thing I see going on there is that she's basking in some masculine admiration."

"That may be all she's doing, but what about _him_?" Hank asked, poking his chin towards Logan, who I have to say was looking mighty fine in jeans and a white tee.

"The only person who has the right to ask him his intentions is Charles, and that's only pro forma. However, he strikes me as being an honorable man. Not all attractions lead to anything. Look, what if you were furry and purple with fangs and all, and you had two girls interested in you—."

"Like that would be even a remote possibility." he scoffed.

"These hypothetical girls are more or less equally attractive, only one of them loves the color purple and fur turns her on while the other one would throw up if she had to kiss you. Which one of them are you going to take along to the Nobel Awards banquet?"

"The normal one. I wouldn't want to date someone with those sorts of extreme fetishes." Hank shrugged.

This was looking hopeless.

"Hank, there are three kinds of love between unrelated adults. There's _eros_, involving the body. There's platonic or _philia_, involving the mind and intellect, and finally there is _agape_, love involving the soul, an unconditional commitment to another's wellbeing. The best case scenario is to find someone with whom you can have all three, but failing that, you need at least two of them.

"Eros on its own doesn't last, because the body doesn't stay attracted to somebody the brain doesn't like. Philia is great, but on its own, all you have is friendship. Agape is the hard one. Now you've made it quite clear that eros is out of the question while Raven's default setting is blue and scaly. "Intellectually you kind of outweigh her—heck, in that respect _I_ find you daunting, and I _have_ a PhD _and_arguably a genius-level IQ, at least on good days."

"I'm daunting?" He pushed his glasses up his nose. "I'm sorry. I assure you that I consider you my equal, especially since that discussion we had about the HeLa cell cultures."

"Thank you very much, Hank. It's your skills in design and engineering I find intimidating. All I have in that respect is a certain fashion sense and knowing how to put my hair up so it stays. However, my point is that wanting Raven to wait for you and your serum for who knows how long is neither philia nor agape. It's selfish." I wanted to tell him not to go blaming her because his libido wasn't bright enough to expand its search parameters to fit.

"Then what do I have to do?" he pleaded.

"It would help if you didn't hang around looking betrayed. If you go on feeling sorry for yourself like this, I will shove you down a well and cap it off so you can learn what miserable really is." I was doing my best to make it funny, but in his state he didn't even smile.

"I don't believe there are any wells around here."

"Then I will go out and get a shovel so I can dig one expressly for that purpose. Hank, if all you love her for is how she looked when you first saw her, then you don't really love her. That's where it begins and ends, and I am not going to hash this out with you any longer." I said it quite firmly.

I really wish he had gone to high school so he could have gone through this whole lovesick business when he was still a teen.

Darwin came over then, sweaty and triumphant. I congratulated him and handed him some juice.

"I'm really grooving on all this," he said, wiping his face. "Hey, what's wrong?" he asked, noticing Hank's withdrawn attitude.

"Nothing," Hank said.

I was watching Angel start the course. Whatever her problem was, (and unlike Hank, I doubt she's lovesick) she was another sulky one and the obstacle course wasn't going to make things any better. It was designed for and by men, and thus called for more upper body strength than most women have, even when they're trained athletes. Add in the fact that a woman's center of gravity is lower, and there was no way she was going to be able to get over those walls. I watched her for a moment before something occurred to me.

Scrambling to my feet, I whistled and waved my arms in the air. "Time-Out! Everybody come over!"

"What? What is it?" she asked as I came up and the group formed around us.

"I didn't say anything about this to Hank or Darwin because their abilities are different, but you're running this course like a human. Why not try running it as a mutant?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"Why swing on ropes when you can fly over the mud pit? Play to your strengths."

I could see that thought sinking in on the faces of the others, if not Angel.

"So—" Alex began. "If you follow that, then why climb a wall when you can knock it down?"

"Uh—," I clearly did not think this through enough, but I had started it.

After running it individually, they ran it as a group. Three times. That is why there is no obstacle course on the grounds any longer. There is, however, a field of mud, splintered wood, and shredded ropes.

I have promised Mr. Black I will cover the cost of rebuilding it. All I can say is, Erik and Charles had better be back damn soon.


	46. Russia

In the tree line above the elegant 17th century dacha, Erik, Charles and Moira (as well as a number of CIA agents of no interest to Erik whatsoever) watched through binoculars as the helicopter touched down. Beaming, a grey-mustached man in the uniform of a lesser general stepped forward to assist someone down from the cockpit, someone slender and shapely dressed in white.

"As Joon-Yi predicted, it's the woman," Erik commented. No surprise there. For humans, the CIA were competent enough, but they were only human.

"She's quite a striking creature, isn't she?" Charles asked. "Not as lovely as our Moira, of course—hello, who is that?"

A second person stepped out of the copter, this one a man, both very large and very tall, yet not outside the human norm. Not quite, but close enough to raise the question of which species he was. Erik scanned his face, the keen way he scanned his surroundings. Nothing on display, except whiskers that would have been fashionable a century ago. "Human or mutant?" he asked.

"Mutant," Charles replied. "Joon-Yi would have mentioned him if she had ever met him, so he must be new. Quite the heavyweight, isn't he? I don't want to alert Miss Frost to our presence here, but I ought to be able to hear through another's ears…" Touching his fingers to his temple, his eyes went unfocused. "Shaw's not coming, but that we knew. Emma's telling the General that she's much better company. He is asking who she brought with her. The brute is her bodyguard, she says…" With that, the group went inside the country house, and the doors closed. "That's all I've got. What now?"

"If she were alone, I'd say storm the place—," Erik began.

"If you wanted to start World War Three on your own, maybe," Moira remarked.

"No, I wouldn't. Charles would have my back. Wouldn't you, Charles?" He grinned at his telepathic friend.

"Reluctantly and with some misgivings, yes. However, I think taking on her bodyguard in close quarters would be a mistake." Charles frowned.

"True, he complicates matters." Erik conceded. "We don't know what his powers might be, but he looks like a combatant. We know what she's here for, which is to convince the Soviets to place missiles in Cuba. I'd say, wait until she comes out and is on her way back."

"We can't follow her. Not when she's in a helicopter," protested Moira's partner.

"We won't have to do so for very long," Erik predicted, grinning like a wolf. "As soon as the helicopter is out of sight of the house, it will experience an unfortunate malfunction."

"Without loss of life, I trust," Charles gave his friend a sharp look.

"If you insist, Charles," Erik put his binoculars away and took out The Count of Monte Cristo, making himself comfortable. The Count had taken Albert, the son of one of his enemies, to meet Haydee, the Greek princess he called his slave. Unbeknownst to either Albert or Haydee, the former's father had betrayed the latter's to his death, and then sold Haydee and her mother into slavery. It was a pity he had not read this book years before, as it was full of intriguing possibilities. The Count worked by arranging events so that someone found themselves in what was for them, a truly intolerable situation, their own private hell, rather like Oedipus finding out he had killed his father, then married and begotten children on his mother. How might Schmidt be maneuvered into such a private hell?

It was a good hour and a half before Emma Frost emerged from the house, accompanied by the general (he was disheveled, she was neat as a pin) and shadowed by her grim bodyguard. Leering at her and pressing kisses on her, the general made his fulsome farewell, backing away as the copter blades sliced the air.

"Now," Moira said, and the CIA transport drove off, outpaced by the aircraft, but Erik had his binoculars trained on it, and better still, was tracking it with his sense for metal. Invisible cables bound it to him; they could not lift above whatever height he willed, deviate from the course he set, over the woods yet not too far from the road. It was like flying a stunt kite with unseen strings; a tweak here, a curbing there, and he made it swoop so low its rotors trimmed branches off the trees. Pull this, and the controls refuse to move. Pull that, and the radio transmitter fails to toggle on.

It was one of the largest things he had ever moved, and he was doing so coolheaded and without rage to strengthen him... How? What had changed in him? Yet now was not the time for such questions.

When he judged the copter was far enough away, he simply stopped the main rotor, and it dropped like a stone. Gunning the engine, the truck sped toward the site of the crash, pulled up, and let the agents out. The copter had broken trees as it went down, and the clearing it had made for itself was not far, the light streaming through to guide them. They ran toward it.

Erik and Charles, not burdened by weapons and ammunition and more motivated than the rest, were ahead of them, at least until Charles stumbled for a reason that had nothing to do with uneven ground.

"What? What's wrong?" Erik pulled up to help his friend to his feet.

"Death. Violent death. The pilot—the pilot just died. He killed him." The telepath looked very ill. "I've never been so close to a death by violence."

"Who killed him?" Erik asked.

"The bodyguard."

"Why?"

"Just because," Charles said, shaking his head. "God, my head, I'm half-blind."

Out of the trees came a growl straight from the Pliocene era, before humans were yet human, let alone mutants, a sound that spoke to the hindbrain and said: Run or be eaten. The fact that it ended in a dark, rumbling chuckle made it worse. Around them, the agents froze in place, looking around at the woods which now seemed much darker and deeper than a moment ago.

"Stay with him. Guard him," Erik ordered Moira.

The copter was very close now. Sprinting for it, Erik found the pilot in the cockpit, his throat torn open from behind with five parallel gashes, as if a beast had put its paw around his neck and slashed. Well, now they had an idea of what the bodyguard's mutation was. Emma Frost was groaning, her pure white clothes splashed and spotted with the pilot's blood. Erik judged that she was suffering from both the crash and the death-trauma, fighting to get unbuckled and out of her seat, but Erik was having none of that. He crimped the cabin in around her, caging her in.

"Where is Schmidt?" he snapped at her. She opened her eyes, looked up at him-but then he saw a flicker in them, up and behind him. He dodged, but the blow still knocked him off his feet and sideways, across the forest floor. Rolling with it, he came up in one smooth motion. His first thought on seeing his attacker's face was, _Sabertooth_?, because the bodyguard had feline fangs bared in a snarl that was also a smile.

"You're Lensherr," the bodyguard said, pointing a clawed finger at him. "Where's that lil slanty-eyed frail of yers?"

It took a split second to translate 'lil slanty-eyed frail' into 'Joon-Yi'. "You mean my _wife_? In Virginia." he was startled into replying.

"Huh," grunted the man-mountain. "Is that a fact?" A gun fired somewhere near them, the bullet _wheeting_ by. "Hang on, I got people to kill. Be right back."

"Hold!" Erik commanded, tightening the copter around Emma until she cried out. "Or you'll be guarding a corpse."

The bodyguard paused. "Ya ever kilt a frail?" he growled.

"Several," Erik replied, thinking of the day Anya and her mother had died. _That_ had been unintentional, but there had been one other, a former matron in charge of female inmates at Auschewitz. Every day she had gone around asking if any were ill or pregnant, promising better beds, bread and milk were waiting in the infirmary if they were. A lie: they went straight to the death house. He had killed _her_ quite deliberatley.

The leonine guard cocked his head, sniffing as if he could smell the truth on Erik, and perhaps he could, for he nodded. "But you're not going to kill this one, because she knows how to find Schmidt and I don't." Wheeling, he moved with the grace and speed of the animal he seemed.

"Damn," Erik swore, glancing at the copter. Interrogate the Frost woman, or stop the killer? Charles was out there, perhaps incapacitated. A burst of gunfire decided him; the CIA were perfectly capable of shooting his friend accidentally. While he cared little for the agents themselves, Moira was at least tolerable and if they were all killed, then getting back to America would be made awkward, not to mention that Joon-Yi, Raven, and the others were waiting on that CIA base.

The copter propeller blades were bent, two broken off entirely. He wrenched them apart with his powers. Now he had weapons, and as he heard a scream cut off by a dying gurgle somewhere far too close, it seemed as though he would need them. Emma Frost could wait. He charged off after the monster.


	47. Always Winter

A half-dozen whirling blades now circling him, satellite like, Erik sprinted through the woods. Metal—people paid no attention to how much of it they had on them. He might not be able to smell as well as the feline mutant seemed to, but he had another sense by which he could track people. Coins, jewelry, belt buckles, zippers, snaps, and in the case of the CIA agents, guns and ammunition. Charles was over _there_, he knew him by the characteristic money clip in his pocket, and there, moving fast, the belt buckle and heavy zipper without a gun, _that _had to be the body-guard killer. Ah! An agent, lying dead, metallic blood-scent hanging very heavy in the air.

He leapt the body, passed living agents, horror making their mouths ugly, warped holes, shouted, "Get to the copter!" as he went by, trees flickering past like frames on a film reel. He was a good runner, he knew that, long limbed and lean as he was, but the killer was faster, for all his bulk. Gunshots, over there, to the left!

An agent held up a gun between himself and the brute, desperately firing rounds that did not even make the mutant slow down—and Erik knew at least a couple of the bullets had hit him. With a snarl-laugh, the feral man batted the weapon from the agent's hand, picked up by the neck and whipped him against the tree. Erik could hear the snap from where he stood.

"Enough!" he snapped out as the mutant let the body drop.

"Lissen. I'm not supposed ta damage you permanent, but that don't mean I can't put a lot of hurting on ya first. You be smart, you'll let me have my fun, and then we'll talk—," the man began.

"We have differing ideas of 'fun'" Erik told him, divided the blades into a thousand razor edged darts, sent them sleeting through the air at his combatant. A dark shape crumpled to the ground.

Erik approached it with caution, recalling how the bullets did nothing to slow the beast-like male, and bringing the scattered darts back together again. The shape on the forest floor was an empty coat.

"Surprise!" roared the mutant from a branch above his head as he leapt down on Erik. Instead of landing on the master of magnetism, however, the feral man landed on the sharp point of a wedge shaped blade that had not existed before he leapt. His weight dragged him down until he was impaled clean through.

"Well, _fuck_," he coughed from his position face down on the ground, as a pool of blood began to spread around him. Scrabbling at the dead leaves, he pushed himself over on his side, tried to pull the blade out, but Erik changed the shape of it, widening both ends, making it impossible to either push or pull out, a barbell stuck through his vitals.

Again with caution, Erik came nearer. Blood welled out around the blade, rhythmical spurts to the slowing beat of the other man's heart. "For what it's worth, yours is the first death in ten years that I regret causing," he told the huge, cat-like male. "There are few enough of us in the world as it is."

"I won't hold it against ya—," the voice was weak now, "S'long as you don't leave me like this…"

"I won't," Erik promised. He waited until the blood ceased to flow before he removed the metal shaft, and even took the trouble of straightening his limbs out neatly, shutting his eyes before he jogged back to the copter, where Emma Frost was doing her best to punch her way out.

A ring of agents surrounded the wreckage where Erik had left her caged up. Their guns were drawn, pointed at the rocking, egg-like wad. At his approach, their attention shifted to him, and he found himself the focus of a dozen gun barrels.

"It's only me," he told them. They were jumpy enough that he didn't use his powers to move the guns aside, as he would certainly have were they not allies. "The bodyguard is dead. So are two of your people. I am sorry." It was a conventional enough phrase.

Charles, looking much recovered, was frowning at the mess. "Are you all right?" Erik asked him.

"More or less," Charles said dismissively, but he looked drawn, with yellow and purple smudges under his eyes. "However, Miss Frost presents a problem. She's terrifically strong in her diamond form and telepathically impervious to boot."

"AAAAhhhh!" came a snarl from inside it, almost as ferocious as the now-dead bodyguard. Wham! The copter cabin rocked.

"I can take care of both problems," Erik said, turning the wreck inside out, except for the seat in which Schmidt's mistress was strapped in her most scintillating aspect, which was, at the moment, also her most furious. Bands of metal sprang up at his command, wrapping themselves around her and tightening.

"You will get nothing from me," she spat. "_Nothing_!"

"You have too high an opinion of yourself," Erik said, constricting the bands tighter…and tighter…until the diamond splintered and crazed at her throat, her wrists and her ankles. "More?" he asked.

"Erik," Charles said, warningly. "Erik, that's enough!" Even as he said it, the blonde woman shifted back to being flesh-and-blood.

"If she tries to shift back, just give her a good tap," Erik turned away.

Charles put his fingers to his temple, then shook his head. "I'm sorry. I'm going to need a few minutes and a dose of aspirin before I try anything. Her mind will not be easy to open up."

Moira handed him a pill box from her kit, but also took out a syringe and a bottle. "Sodium pentothal," she explained as she injected Emma Frost with it. "I figure that whatever you can do, having her more relaxed and chatty can't hurt and it'll make taking her back easier."

After a few minutes, Frost's head nodded and lolled on her shoulders, a soft smile spreading across her lips. There was a very good term in English for a creature like her, so beautiful yet so corrupt: whited sepulcher. Her chosen color, white, cemented the comparison. She lived with Schmidt, shared his table, his bed, even read his mind—. Some women were drawn to men with money and power above any other consideration, but knowing what he knew of Schmidt, he was inclined to think that something more was going on with this icy creature.

"Your guard is dead," he informed her.

"Good," she surprised them. "He was one scary bastard, quite frankly. Excusing my French."

"Enough of that. Where is Schmidt?" Erik asked.

"It's not where he is," She gave him a big smile, full of teeth that looked just a trifle too small and oddly rounded. "It's where he's _going_ to be."

"Then where is he going to be?" he asked.

"Virginia!" Charles burst in, the skin over his cheekbones stretched out thin. "Erik, Moira—he's going to our base with his people. They're going to kill all the humans they can and suborn or abduct our people."

"Get on the radio. Immediately. Warn them," Erik commanded.

"We can't do that," protested Moira's partner. "We don't have powerful enough radio equipment to relay back even to our Moscow safehouse, let alone home base. Then there's the security risk—."

"It's _your_ colleagues he's going to be killing," he pointed out. "Not our recruits. But Mr. Black has been decent to us, all things considered, and making an effort to save his life is the least we can do in return."

"Erik, we really can't. Not at least until we get back to Kiev, and we have to retrieve the bodies first," Moira pointed out.

"Then organize it and let's go," Charles said.

Erik looked to Emma Frost. "Tell me, how did Schmidt manage to convince you Joon-Yi was wrong about what will happen if there is nuclear war? One of our team who is even more brilliant ran the numbers and his prediction is that once the insects are gone, we—human and mutant alike—will survive no more than five years. Five years to extinction."

"He didn't," Emma put her head to the side and winked at him. "I'm sure she's right, the little bitch, she's the type who would be. That's why I made arrangements on my own about the food, enough for years and years. I'm looking forward to all the rest of you being gone. It'll be so nice and quiet without you. Like in the morning after a snowfall, all clean and pure and silent. I love the sound of snow, don't you? I even like what she called it. 'Nuclear Winter.' I hope it lasts _forever_."

Erik and Charles exchanged glances. "She is insane." Erik stated.

"Speaking as another telepath, I can tell you it isn't that simple. The White Witch come to life— 'Always winter and never Christmas'…" Charles let it trail off.

"You made that last bit sound like a quote," Erik commented.

"It is. From another children's book, I'm afraid," Charles rubbed his neck.

"Erik!" Moira had gone off to see about the bodies, but now she returned at a sprint. "You said the bodyguard was dead, but what did you do with the body?"

"Do with it? I left it there, of course. He was huge." Erik made a gesture of dismissal.

"There's a blood pool under a tree, but no body," she said.

"That's impossible. There was a hole in him you could have seen daylight through."

Charles rendered Emma Frost unconscious telepathically and left her under the guard of agents before he joined Erik and Moira under the tree where Erik had killed the tiger-like mutant. There was a large pool of bloody mud, shiny and stinking, its outline roughly that of a body.

"Tell me how he could have lost that much blood and walked away," Erik challenged them, but he was also looking around for the coat the mutant had dropped in his feint.

"Oh. Oh, dear," Charles wiped a hand over his face. "He healed. Like Logan. My god. He must have been the brother."

"The brother?" Erik asked.

Charles explained about the look he had had into Logan's mind. "I didn't put the two together until now."

"That would make sense," Moira nodded. "Because of Joon-Yi, we know that traits run in families—."

Her words were cut off by screaming back at the copter. When the three returned, they found that Emma Frost was gone— and the two guards left to watch her were both dead, mauled as if by a huge cat.

* * *

><p>AN: The children's book Charles refers to is The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis. The movie version is where I first saw James McAvoy, as Mr. Tumnus, the faun. He was adorable. And shirtless. In the context of Diamond-form Emma, crazed means 'finely cracked', and when Charles says Shaw is going to suborn their recruits he means lure away to the Dark Side. My thanks to Bub for pointing out when I get too out there.

Well, since my count is now 299, I have every hope that this chapter will bump the review count over 300!


	48. Talents

Moira told me that after she graduated college (summa cum laude with a degree in Political Science) and started job-hunting, she was always asked two questions during interviews. 'How fast do you type?' and 'Do you take dictation?' It was taken for granted that she would make and serve coffee as well.

Thank God for feminism and voice-recognition word processing software. Without them, I believe would have hanged myself before I was twenty out of sheer frustration. I certainly couldn't type up to employable standards without mutant powers; I'd be doing no better than hunt-and-pecking. Pulling the last sheet of paper out of the typewriter, I checked it over. Okay. No typos this time. I placed the page in a folder with the other two, then opened up the…top part of the typewriter. Pre-electronic era technology is not my strong suit, but I had read that typewriter ribbons kept an impression of all key strokes. Therefore, a resourceful person could get access to sensitive information by thieving the ribbon used to type the document in question and reading it.

I did not want this information getting out. I barely wanted to make it known to anyone else, but Mr. Black had done a lot for us and I wanted to give him something in return. I removed the used portion of ribbon, rethreaded it with the new part, and put it back together. Adding a blank check to the folder, I wound my way through the corridors to the director's office, pausing only to set fire to the used ribbon in a handy ashtray.

Mr. Black was in, and greeted me with, "Mrs. Lensherr, this is an unexpected surprise. Won't you come in?"

"Thank you, yes." He stood up when I entered, as a gentleman does, a touch I appreciated. I took the seat opposite the desk, and began by taking out the check. "To get this out of the way first, will twenty thousand be enough to cover rebuilding the obstacle course?"

"Oh, that," he waved dismissively. "Forget about it. Did you see the grass growing up inside the tire run? This is a research facility, not a training camp. It was there for whoever wanted to make use of it, and as you can see—," he slapped his ample belly by way of demonstration, "none of us did. I'll just have the groundskeepers clean it up, till the ground and plant grass."

"I do regret the destruction, though. I fear I am not suited to handling young adults. The children I watched in the orphanage were younger and had no powers." I looked down not so much out of modesty as from shame. I didn't mind lying outrageously to the mutant haters, but when it comes to people I liked, I much prefer to say nothing.

He propped his elbow on his desk and rested his chin on his hand. "You're actually doing quite well when it comes to team-building. They listen to you without giving you lip. You got them working together, and enthusiastically, too. The martial arts training was a good idea, and of all the things that could have been destroyed, you picked something that wasn't crucial or expensive. What's on the agenda for tomorrow?"

"In the morning, lessons in first aid, and more martial arts in the afternoon," I told him, shifting the folder. "They are, for the most part, eager to be part of a group and to work."

"Sounds like there's at least one who's a disciplinary problem," he remarked.

There was, and it was Angel, who had the idea that she was on vacation. That was a can of worms I didn't want to open at the moment. "I wish I could get Hank and Alex to stop locking horns, but I think that's simply youthful masculine aggression. However, that isn't why I'm here. I had another reason for stopping in besides paying for the damage.

"In the orphanage, one of the first things the nuns taught me from the Bible, after first frightening me with the part of Leviticus which calls for stoning women who speak with the dead and practice magic, was a parable.

"They told me there was once a man who was going on a journey and he had three servants. He did not want to take all his gold with him, so to the first he gave four talents of gold, to the second, two, and to the last, one. The first two servants had doubled the money entrusted to them, so he praised and rewarded them, but the last only hid his talent in the ground and did nothing to make it grow, so he was punished. _I_ thought the master was lucky to get any of his money back intact, but that, I was told, was not the point. When God gives you talents of whatever sort, you have a duty to put them to use." (I was actually brought up Unitarian, and I did point out things like that in Sunday School, sometimes to the exasperation of the teachers. )

"Well, I am not a Catholic. I am not sure what I am, but this story does have a point. I have talents, and if at the end of my life, I am called on to account for what I did with them, I want to have a satisfactory answer." That, at least, was the truth. "I told you that my mother could predict some future events."

"Yes." He took his elbow from the table and sat up straighter. "Only natural events, if I recall correctly."

"That is so. I, however, can see other things. Imperfectly, and not as completely as I could wish, but I can see some future events. I have here three lists." Opening up the folder, I laid the first sheet in front of him. "I separated them for security reasons. Each alone is worthless. Two together are suggestive. The order is very important. This is a list of people who will do…certain things, and the date on which they will do them."

"November 23, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald," he began to read it aloud.

I shushed him. "Please. When you've seen the others, you will not want them in the same room ever again, much less breathe a word of them."

"I've never heard of this man. Is he important?" Mr. Black looked up at me quizzically.

"Not yet. He will be, but if you investigate him too closely, too openly now, events may change out of recognition. I don't get second visions about a single event—or at least, I have not yet. This is a list of what these people will do." I handed him the second page.

His eyebrows bunched together, and I saw his lips form certain words as he read silently. 'Assassinate. Murder. Assassinate. Shoot. Murder. Abandon to her death by drowning. Murder. Massacre. Destroy. Abduct, rape and murder. Collapse two skyscrapers in New York and damage the Pentagon.' I had not only covered political events, but thrown in a few serial killers for good measure

Putting the two lists together so they overlapped, he looked at the two together. "September 11, 2001—Who is Al-Qaida?"

"A terrorist group of Muslim extremists who resent both Soviet and American interference in their affairs. I'm afraid that the further ahead these visions are, the less reliable they will become, especially if you can prevent the earlier items from happening. The visions stop in 2013, when I will be seventy-nine. I believe that is when I will die. My mother could not see beyond her own lifespan, nor any seer I ever heard of. This is the third—the people who will be targeted, and where it will take place." I gave him the last sheet of paper, and watched his face go almost as white when he put it together with the others.

"Dear God." he said, and I began to fear for his health. Another one like Hendry, with the added complication of obesity. What could I do if he were going to go into a coronary? I could unblock his arteries, I suppose, but where would I put the cholesterol? Best just to holler for help, I suppose. "The first name on this list…" He looked over at me for confirmation.

"Yes." I said. It was President Kennedy, of course.

"Dear God." he repeated. "This is worth a lot more than an obstacle course. You could destroy the whole building and buy forgiveness with this."

"I do hope it won't come to_ that_," I joked. "It's not intended as payment for anything. Consider it a gift, if not from mutantkind to America, than one from me to you. You're better placed to do something with this than I am."

"I don't know what to say except—what was that?" I had heard it too, a sound like a very loud flashbulb going off with a 'Bamph!', and to me it was very familiar. The following scream and splat was not, but I had a fair idea of what was going on.

"Azazel!" I gasped. "Get down! It's Shaw's teleporter. He can't pop in blind or into too small a space because he might materialize in an object. Can you alert everyone in the base from here?"

"Yes." He reached for a mike on his desk. Another 'Bamph', another scream, another splat.

"Tell everyone to get into as small a windowless space as they can and lock the door until you give an all-clear. Don't engage, just hide!"

He did it, tripping a siren as well, I took the mike at the end and added, "Mystique, Logan, Darwin—all our team—This is _not_ a drill. Prepare for paranormal hostiles, and I'm on my way!" I turned off the mike. "What's that door?"

"The toilet. It has no windows." he said.

"Excellent. Take a chair in there and wedge it under the door handle. Don't come out until _I_ tell you, 'Lycopodium', got that?"

"Yes." He was already moving as I tore out the door.

* * *

><p>AN: As I understand it, Nightcrawler's powers work as described, and since Azazel is his daddy, (got to speak to Mystique about that life choice), in this AU that's how his powers work. I am the writer and I say so, so there! Nyah!


	49. Teamwork

The helmet was so uncomfortable that Sebastian Shaw left it for the last moment, after the bodies were already thudding. "The box," he instructed Riptide, and the other mutant obeyed instantly. Lifting the metal shell from its padded cavity, he made a face at the tastelessly florid trim around the edges. How like the Russians! Settling it into place and leaving Riptide to wait for his signal, Shaw strolled down the walk casually.

(In the meantime, a frantic council of war was going on in the mutants' Rec Room. "We need some kinda strategy, fast and dirty," Logan assessed the situation. "I'm taking the outside; unless they're dumber than posts, they'll have a point man out there. He's my look-out. Mystique, Banshee—you get to the office bloc. They're targeting the suits, not the science labs. Ya work as a team. No splitting up. Chimera, you get the rest. Shaw's their big gun, and ya know him."

"Attack Shaw directly and he'll only absorb the blow, whether it's physical or an energy bolt," Joon-Yi took over. "Nor will he come in unprepared for a physical confrontation. I'm sure he powered up before he arrived. That means unconventional methods are called for. We'll have to improvise…")

Shaw expected armed opposition when he entered the CIA base. Azazel would have decimated their ranks, leaving the living panicked and trigger-happy. After proving his superiority beyond any possible doubt by laughing at their feeble attacks and crushing them like the insects they were, he would proceed to the room where the terrified recruits were cowering and magnanimously point out to them what a mistake they were making. They would then gratefully accept his protection (although perhaps one or two would persist in their folly) and depart the CIA.

However, it seemed that someone was not following the script. When Shaw entered the building, against all expectations, it was eerily silent and to all appearances, deserted. Looking around the entry hall, he was visited by a vague unease, as if he were a schoolboy summoned to the headmaster's office for some unknown reason— to be rewarded for some achievement? Punished for some infraction of the rules he didn't recall making? Told bad news? Told good news? Whipped until he bled or violated until he screamed?

The anti-telepathy helmet muted ambient noise slightly. He lifted it up enough to expose his ears, but the complex was just as quiet. His source had not known if any of the recruits had mental powers, but it was best to be cautious, so he lowered it again before he called out, "Azazel!"

The empty halls made mock of his call, echoing it and amplifying it, but it had the desired result. The red-skinned mutant popped in next to him. "Some half-dozen did I slay, but I have not yet found the director, " he said. "One moment, they were everywhere. There was a big whooping alarm. Then the alarm was silent and there was no one."

"Where did they go?" Shaw asked, his words sounding complaining in his own ears. He was beginning to feel foolish and he did not like it.

"Out for pizza," said a male voice, and a match flared. As the speaker slipped into view, he lit a cigar. "What's it to you?"

Shaw recognized him immediately. "Jimmy," he said, with a fraternal fondness. "I'm glad to finally meet you."

"The feeling ain't mutual. There's only one person alive who has the right to call me that, and you're not him," snapped the younger Creed brother. "If ya gotta call me anything, make it Logan, or else Wolverine. _You've_ gotta be Shaw." The last sentence was said in a louder voice, pitched to carry; someone was listening.

"My apologies," Shaw smiled, but it was thinner than the air at ten thousand feet above sea level. "Where are the others, if the humans are not at home?"

"Hangin' out in the Rec room," Logan turned and walked away.

"Is that where you're going?" Shaw motioned to Azazel to continue his search. Assistant Director Black had to be found and done away with; there was too great a chance of some compromise being worked out if he remained alive, such as civil rights being granted to all citizens regardless of genetic variation. A human-loving peacemaker like Xavier might see that as a positive development, but Shaw knew better; it would be an impediment to the dominion of the Evolved.

"Can't go in there with this, I'd never hear the end of it," Logan said, waving the foul cigar. "It's that way, though." Only someone who had met Victor Creed could see Logan as any improvement. Shaw followed where the cigar pointed, to a room where the unfortunate and misled recruits were—acting as if nothing was wrong.

Acting, however, was the operative word. The dancer looked up from a fashion magazine to regard him with mild interest, her eyes heavy-lidded, her lips full of promise, but the others were too stiff-spined, aware he was there and acting as though they weren't. There were two boys clustered around a pinball machine, the dark-skinned one playing while the blond exclaimed at his prowess, and over there at the table was a young man in glasses playing cards with—Jenny Song.

(Outside, Riptide leaned against a railing, waiting. He never heard Wolverine at all. As Logan had said, he was real good at stealthy.)

"You're supposed to be in Russia," Shaw burst out, accusingly.

"Am I?" she looked up for the first time. "I—."

Something flickered in her eyes for the briefest moment, and then she lit up with a demonic glee. "Oh, my god! You got your head stuck in a bucket! And you've come here for help! Good decision. Don't worry, I know just what to do. There's liquid dish soap in the kitchenette. I'll have that off you in a jiffy."

"It always pleases you to goad me," he grated out. "I'm not about to rise to the bait this time, Jenny. I'm sorry; _**Mrs. Lensherr**_. This," he tapped the metal, "_is_ a silly looking thing, but necessary. You know, you and I are not that unalike. Both with powerful but flawed fathers and mothers who had little choice but to accept their fate. Both abandoned and impoverished at an early age, left with unstable mothers. Both determined to gain an education and better ourselves despite all obstacles."

Again something flickered in her eyes. "Two words. _Nazi Scientist."_

He ignored her and addressed the others. "My name is Sebastian Shaw. I don't know what she may have told you about me, but I'm not here to hurt any of you. Not even her. A war is coming in which the humans will learn who we truly are and what we can do," Shaw made his tones mellifluous, letting the love he felt for them shine out of his face. "You have a choice to make, each of you. You can either bow down and be enslaved—or rise up to rule." He let his gaze fall on each in turn. "Why fight for a society that hates and fears you?"

(Meanwhile, in the office bloc, Azazel popped into the assistant director's office only to be taken aback. A very beautiful young girl stood there, her skin a deep, glowing blue, and not a single garment obscuring her loveliness. "Hello," she whispered shyly. The young man he_ didn't_ see for gawking at the naked girl let out a short, focused shout that shattered the window behind him and sent him to his knees. The girl calmly laid him out with a flying kick to the jaw. Then they bound and trussed him, hands, feet and tail. leaving him facedown on the floor.)

"Follow me, and you shall live like kings. And queens." He caressed the dancer with his eyes.

Then Joon-Yi opened her mouth. "If you mean the way kings and queens lived in 962, not 1962. Dysentery, plague, rotten food, rotting teeth, no running water, the Dark Ages come again. Both science and common sense are on my side. I could go on all night about it, but I won't. There's no need. Your plan will never come to pass, and on October 22, you will die. I have seen it."

"And on October 23, I will—prove you wrong," he replied. What he wanted to say was, _cut out your tongue and your vocal cords_, but it would ruin the impression he was trying to make.

"You won't, though," said the bespectacled youth. "I don't mean about the vision, I can't comment knowledgably on future events, but scientifically speaking, she is correct. After an initial interlude of chaos and anarchy, conditions will rapidly sink to that of the early Medieval period, but without adequate food stores, I foresee a further erosion into cannibalism shortly thereafter. In any case, without insect pollinators, the point is moot. Extinction will inevitably follow within fifty-four to sixty months. If not sooner."

"Shoot, am I the only one who can't follow what he says half the time?" complained the dancer.

"No," said the blond boy. "Hank, put a sock in your mouth and chew on it."

"The bucket isn't helping your credibility either, to be quite frank." the young man—Hank—finished.

He took a deep breath. "Those who are not with us are by definition against us."

"Those who are with you are by definition idiots and it's going to be a cakewalk for us." Joon-Yi Lensherr smiled sweetly and venomously.

"You truly think so? What about this?" Goaded beyond endurance, he flung a searing lance of energy at her, and had the satisfaction of seeing her small form fly through the window, shattering the glass, and continue all the way across the courtyard until she impacted against the building wall on the other side. He poured on more power, rupturing the earth, making it break apart into burning chunks, fragmenting the wall and burying her under it.

He heard the screams and outcries of the recruits, but he kept up his onslaught. The blond boy leapt in, countering his lance with a seething pulse of red, but at an angle, diverting it. Their combined force made a sizzling fireball that swept out, setting fire to trees and tearing up a geodesic dome.

Shaw got no good of it; the boy had not attacked _him_, had aimed away deliberately. He summoned up a small inferno, made to fling it at him—and then the dancer _spat_.

She didn't get his eyes, thanks to the angle and the helmet, but his nose and chin—. "AH!" Burning without flame, chemical! Shaw swiped at his face, feeling skin disintegrate.

"Now, Darwin!" Hank cried out. Hard shelled, steel-strong arms swept around him from behind, lifting him off his feet. He struck out, grabbing for the energy, but then there was a prick of a needle at his throat, and unconsciousness claimed him.

TBC….

* * *

><p>AN: Yes. I AM evil, I truly am. I am cutting it off here. Hooray for teamwork!


	50. Buried Alive

The plan, insofar as there was one, was this: Begin with everyone ignoring Shaw and then gradually taunt him up to the point where he either burst into flame from sheer ridicule or tried to kill me, whichever came first. And I would make _sure_ I was the one he wanted to kill, since I already had a head start in that direction and I could shield myself. My field was up around me and I was ready. Alex's role was to divert Shaw's attack, while Angel was to counterattack at the worst moment for him. Then Darwin would jump him, Hank at the ready with needle in hand and a big dose in the syringe.

However, while I can shield all right, any impact and I go flying like someone kicked a hamster's exercise ball, me being the hamster. The Admin wing's facing wall stopped me, and then Shaw brought it down on me, burying me under several tons of concrete, glass, and rebar. It was too heavy to shift off, too heavy to keep holding all of it up off of me, so I gradually shrank my shield down, easing the rubble down on my limbs, tense and alert to any sudden shifts it made. All I concentrated on was keeping the area around my head clear, and making sure the breath wasn't crushed out of my lungs. That and not having a panic attack, as this was pretty much a ready-made situation for having one. Powerless, ignorant of what was going on up there—had we won? Had Shaw won? Yeah, I was on the edge and then some.

But a panic attack would destroy my concentration, which would mean death for sure, so I staved it off by telling myself someone would dig me out, if not the kids to rescue me, then Shaw, to make sure I was dead. Someone would dig for me, all I had to do was wait and there was no way I would suffocate, no more than if I were swimming, I could keep going on this much air four times longer than anyone else, ten times longer.

I don't know how long it took, but after a while I could hear digging, and then one of Sean's screams, then more digging, and another scream (Sean was sonically pulverizing the bigger chunks of wall,) and another round of digging. Then I could hear some voices, and stuff shifted, dust and gravel sifting through, and a big piece moved, the air got fresher and_ then_ Darwin shouted, "She's here!"

"Oh, God, oh, God, is she alive?" Raven sobbed, and I tried to say, 'Yes, I'm okay,', but my mouth was too dry and wouldn't work. It was all right, though, because in another moment, he had picked me up and carried me back in to what remained of the Rec room, where he put me on the sofa.

Raven threw herself down next to me, hugging me and weeping. "You're bleeding! Hank, she's bleeding, fix it. Fix it right now," she pleaded.

"Water?" I rasped out, while Hank looked me over, picked a few bits of glass out of my leg, (making me hiss and grind my teeth with pain) then set about disinfecting the scrapes and scratches. Somebody, Angel, I think, gave me some wonderful wet cold water that was the most delicious I had ever tasted.

"Thank you, Angel. Thank you all—Did we get him? Did we get Shaw?"

"Yeah," Logan said. "We got him and two others. A guy that looks like the devil and a long-haired pretty boy."

Azazel and Riptide, both. "Alive?" I asked.

"Yeah. For now." he replied. "The devil's got a dislocated jaw and the pretty boy has two broken wrists."

"Make _sure_ they can't get away. Keep them tranked," I instructed. I could feel a panic attack hanging over me, waiting to descend like a cloud of crows on a carcass, but I had to hang on just a little longer, a little longer, this was too important. "But Shaw you have to treat different. If he can move at all, if he can move a finger, he'll build his power back up. Make it so he can't move. Like me under the wall."

"You want us to bury him alive?" Darwin asked.

"No, he has to stay alive for now. Has anyone heard from Erik and the others?" I asked. That faraway, tunnely icy feeling was tugging at me. Just a little longer.

"No," Hank said, "but all the phone lines are down and the relay tower's melted." He dabbed mercurochrome on another scrape. "All your injuries seem to be superficial."

"I'm sorry to put you to all this trouble. Oh. Oh! Mr. Black. He was hiding in his restroom. I have to tell him it's all clear—," I tried to get up but my legs had no intention of going anywhere right then and for that matter, I was missing some pieces. "Where are my prostheses?"

"Somewhere under the wall, and you're not going anywhere," Raven got bossy at me. "I'll tell him."

"He was supposed to wait for me to say 'Lycopodium'." I remembered.

"Then I'll say 'Lycopodium' with your voice." she said, and she went off.

"Okay—You have to make sure Shaw can't move at all," I repeated to no one in particular. "But I can't come up with any ideas how right now."

"I got a few of my own, don't worry." Darwin said. "Alex, Sean, let's get some shovels. Remember those mud pits in the obstacle course?"

"I think I'm about done for, for right now, but, Hank," I said, "That stupid ugly helmet Shaw was wearing. The bucket."

"I've got it," he said. "It's in my lab, and it's very secure. When I have a moment, I plan to study it—."

"_No_," I said, "_Don't_ study it. _Destroy_ it. Crush it and melt it down or dissolve it in acid. It's _important_. You cannot imagine how important. If you meant what you said about considering me your equal at all, you will do it. _Now_. Promise me. Promise me you will." I wanted to say, don't let Erik get his hands on it, don't let him even see it, but that would have led to him asking awkward questions, and I was not up to concocting a good explanation at that moment.

"All right. I will, I promise." he said, peering at me over his glasses with all the intense sincerity he possessed.

And _then_ I had my panic attack, and it was a big one.

* * *

><p>AN: Joon-Yi did not suffer any spinal injuries under the wall, she's just in shock. Maybe nobody will wind up suffering any spinal injuries the way this is going! And yes, this is a supershort short one, but it's an important transition for the next one, when Erik, Charles and Moira return.


	51. Buried Alive, Part Two

Sebastian Shaw came to when cold water saturated him. Opening his eyes, he saw the feeble beam of a dying flashlight, feet encased in muddy shoes, and dirt. A lot of dirt. He was buried up to his neck, no, up to his _chin_ in wet earth, not wet enough to be mud, just wet enough to be very, very heavy. He couldn't move. He was wet, filthy, cold, and immobile. It was still dark out, and wherever he was, it was away from electric lights, away from any buildings.

On the plus side of the column, someone had removed the helmet and dressed his acid burns.

That was not a great deal on the plus side. "What?" He realized he sounded squeaky and panicked, so he tried again. "What is this? Release me! Release me at once! I want my lawyer and I want a phone call."

"Damn," someone male marveled. He looked up, and since he could not see a patch of paler skin, guessed it was the darker skinned young man. "You got balls, calling for your lawyer. Balls but no brains. It's not happening, man. You're lucky we're keeping the CIA off your ass. You killed six of their men and put one in the infirmary. Several of them want to have a word or two with your head and one of these shovels. Okay, you can turn the water off now!" he called to someone unseen. Picking up the flashlight, he made as if to walk away.

"Wait! I'll give you half of everything I own, if you dig me up! I'll adopt you as my son!" Shaw pleaded.

"And Satan took Christ up on the mountain top, showed him all the kingdoms of the earth, and said, 'Dominion over all these will I give to you, if you will only bow down and worship me.' Sorry, not interested." The flashlight bobbled as the youth walked away.

Well. Once he was free, that boy would be the first to die. Second, if Jenny Song were still alive. When had he last made such an error in judgment? Because she was tiny and cute and perky (might as well admit it, because she was female) he had assumed she was harmless. Even though she had told him outright how intelligent she was, he had thought her powerless.

Shaw tried to summon up his own powers, to cleave the earth that imprisoned him, but he only succeeded in warming himself, and only slightly. He had thrown away his stored kinetic energy in lashing out at Jenny, exactly as she must have planned. And still he couldn't move, not even a finger. Before burying him, they had wrapped him in bandages—no, in some sort of adhesive tape, arms bound to his sides and legs bound together. He was helpless.

For now, at least. When the sun rose, he could sip of its boundless energy, grow strong.

But as the sky lightened, he realized he was in the shade of a giant tree, his face towards the north. Not even a wan sunbeam to warm him, and by then he badly needed warmth. The cold wet dirt sucked away his body heat. He also faced the humiliation of a bursting bladder and cramping bowels. He was already wet, so the urine was the lesser problem, but eventually he had to relax his sphincter, shit himself. They would pay dearly for this humiliation.

Now he could see them keeping guard over him from a distance. A new pair of mutants came to take over from the other, and one of them came nearer, his hands full. It was Logan.

"Hey." he grunted. "Here." He screwed a bottle of water into the dirt, a straw angled so Shaw could suck on it, and then unwrapped a bar of chocolate, placing it where he could reach it with his lips. Then he put a hat on Shaw's head before ripping off the old bandages and slapping on new. "Joon-Yi is big on the Geneva Conventions, don't ask me why, 'cause she didn't sign them and neither did you. She doesn't want any business about anybody sayin' we treated you unusually cruel. Maybe that's how she knows there's a difference 'tween us and you. So ya got food and water and medical treatment. The hat's because body heat escapes out the top of your head. I ain't doin' this for you, I'm doin' it for her."

After providing that small kindness, Logan stomped away. The vibration impacts weren't enough to make a difference in Shaw's power levels.

He waited; the guard changed again. Why the wait? What were they waiting for? They couldn't keep him buried there forever…

And then Erik came, striding over the field, not on the ground, but on discs of metal, one disc darting forward to act as a stepping stone for each foot as he lifted it. No vibrations that might strengthen him. Lensherr stopped when he was about ten feet away from Shaw, close enough for them to see each other but not so close that he would have to stoop to Shaw's level.

"You very nearly killed my wife," Erik stated, impassionate and cold.

"I wish I had," Shaw snarled.

"I'm sure you do," Erik returned, with a warning note of anger. He continued, calm and cold once more. "Seeing you here like this: filthy, humbled, helpless, in it up to your neck figuratively and literally, all your influence, your schemes, your money, your power _and_ your powers come to naught, at my mercy—and you are at my mercy, make no mistake—I could not have planned it better had I tried. These are the ultimate intolerable circumstances for you."

"I—I'm sorry," Shaw abased himself. "Erik—this is—I _saved_ you, Erik. I singled you out. If not for me, you would have gone to the gas chamber that day. I preserved your life."

"Yes, you did," Erik admitted, a slight tilt to his head. "You saved my life. And my mother's too. Only then you had her shot in front of me, so close her blood spattered my face. I can still feel it on my cheek when I think of it."

"I'm sorry. Believe me, I have regretted that before this," he scrambled to redeem himself, if only a fraction, in those steel blue eyes. "I taught you, Erik, didn't I? What you were, how to use your powers…"

"So you did. With instruments of torture. But do you know something? I would have learned anyhow. Those young people who made such short work of you _and_ yours all learned without your sort of guidance. My friend Charles, my wife Joon-Yi—they didn't need your help to become what they are. All you taught me was hatred and anger, and in Auschwitz I hardly needed your help to learn those either.

"You also abandoned me, and for many years I wandered the earth believing myself alone, a freak and a monster. Now I'm among my own kind. There was a book of fairy tales my mother read to me—you recall your Andersen, do you not? There was a duckling that believed he was a freak until he met a company of swans and learned he was a swan. And they are such beautiful creatures, swans." He pointed with his chin toward the group of mutants at the edge of the field, out of earshot. " 'Oh, brave new world, that has such creatures in it.' Shakespeare; I'm mixing my references. It's a world you will not live to see."

"You can't just kill me! The CIA will, will," Shaw tried.

"The CIA are very happy with the Lensherrs just now. Perhaps it wouldn't have been my first impulse, but Joon-Yi's first thought, when your people attacked, was of their lives, and they are quite appreciative. I'm not above using credit she built up. This is a freebie, as they put it." Erik reached into his pocket, pulled out something. It drifted toward him in the air, turning so he could see it was a coin, and a coin with a swastika on it. "Do you recognize it? It's the same coin you wanted me to move that day. I can move it without difficulty now."

Hanging in the air before Shaw's eyes, it changed. The millgrain edge thinned and became tiny, sharp sawteeth. "Erik," he croaked.

"Hush. I am not you. I said, before, that you were at my mercy, and I will have mercy on you."

"Thank—."

"The appropriate mercy. It will be quick and clean. And I will walk away knowing I have done the right thing." The coin blurred with speed before it dug into Shaw's forehead and put an end to Klaus Sebastian Shaw Schmidt forever.

* * *

><p>AN: Don't worry; this is not the end of this fic, but I can see the end from where I'm standing. At this moment, it's practically writing itself.

Of course, the question is, what will I write after this? Right now, there's a potential Sherlock fic (the BBC twenty-first century version starring Benedict Cumberbatch and John Freeman.) nagging at me. Yes, there will be an OC. I know lots of people like and write slash, but I don't believe I could write it and do a good job of it. I have only found a small handful of slash writers whose work I really enjoy, mainly because I like stories that are properly stories, with more than just sex, and ones that are just sex get boring very quickly.

Also, to me a slash pairing with characters who are ostensibly straight in canon is like saying—what, women can't be as strong and interesting and adventurous and funny and dedicated as men, so you have to put two men together? Hollywood still tends to shoehorn women into narrow and uninteresting roles, playing the hero's improbably beautiful love interest and a handful of other equally boring parts rather than making them female heroes. And when they try for female heroes, often they get them wrong. But I do think women can be all those things, and so I write fanfic. End of rant.


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